


Only Time

by losingmymindtonight



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, I basically AU it, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Parent Tony Stark, Peter Parker Lives, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Temporary Character Death, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, at least, it will be, yeah our boy survives the Snap
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2020-02-28 19:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18762646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/losingmymindtonight/pseuds/losingmymindtonight
Summary: On Titan, Peter Parker survives the Stone's twisted lottery. Back on Earth, Pepper Potts and May Parker do not.Tony is still left with a shattered world, trying desperately to build something in the wreckage.And the universe is still mourning. It is still seeking revenge.In the end, we will always end up here.





	1. One Love Must Die

**Author's Note:**

> THIS FIC WILL GO INTO THE EVENTS OF ENDGAME, ALBEIT IN AN AU. IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN ENDGAME, COME BACK WHEN YOU HAVE.
> 
> I started wondering how Endgame would've gone if Peter hadn't died, but then I realized that the movie essentially couldn't happen, because Tony wouldn't have the the incentive to create time travel.  
> Then I wondered what would've happened if Pepper died in Peter's place, and this fic was born.  
> (For reference, this will be my fix-it for Endgame as well. I'm still living in denial.)
> 
> WARNINGS: discussions of death, grief, suicidal thoughts, some cursing, IVs, Tony is generally very upset

“Here,” Tony held out one of the last bags of food, nudging it into Peter’s shoulder when the kid didn’t take it straight away, “eat.”

Peter shook his head. He was still in the Iron Spider suit, the nanites glimmering in the low emergency lights. Tony had barely seen him out of it since leaving Earth, even though he knew that the original suit was underneath it. He wondered if it was a safety thing, if the kid was trying to use it as a barrier between him and the harsh, far-too-adult reality they were staring in the face.

If he’s wrapped in a shell, nothing can hurt him.

“I’ve already eaten today,” the kid finally muttered.

Tony resisted the urge to sigh. After all, it’d be a waste of oxygen. “Yeah, that was lunch, and now it’s dinnertime. C’mon, Parker, we haven’t been away from Earth long enough for you to forget something as basic as mealtimes, right?”

The joke fell flat. It was, admittedly, a pretty bad one, but Peter usually laughed at nearly anything he tried. Now, though, the kid just turned to stare up at him with glassy eyes. “I know we’re almost out of food.” He nodded to the bag. “We need to save it.”

“Who told you that?” He shook his head as soon as he finished asking. “You know what? Never mind. Stupid question. Of course it was Little Blue-Peep. Damn it, I told her we weren’t _telling_ you-”

“Telling me what? That we’re gonna die out here?” Peter’s voice wasn’t harsh, resentful. It was just… accepting. Hopeless in a way that made every fiber of Tony’s being recoil. No voice that young should ever sound that jaded, that world-weary. “I already know, Mister Stark. I mean, I’m not an idiot.”

There was nothing he could say to that, because it wouldn’t be fair to lie to the kid at this point, and Peter had already spoken the truth. To repeat it would only be added cruelty.

Instead, he lowered himself down beside the kid, rested his back against the cockpit’s wall and tried not to look out at the stars that would be their burial ground. Then, he pressed the bag of food back into Peter’s lap. “Please eat.”

Tony could see the request land strangely with the kid, saw his eyes flicker uncomfortably as he tried to dissect it. The kid knew what Tony did: Tony Stark never said please, never begged, never cajoled. He just… ordered. He told Peter what to do, the behavior he expected. _Kid, that’s the wizard, get on it. Pete, you gotta let go, I’m gonna catch you. I don't wanna hear another single pop culture out of you for the rest of the trip, you understand?_

“But you need to eat, too,” the kid finally said.

“I won’t starve, kid. Trust me.”

“You can’t… you can’t just make more food when we’re in space, Mister Stark.” There was a hint of hysteria in Peter’s voice, and, god, the kid wasn’t trained for this. He shouldn’t even be here. He was supposed to be stopping bicycle thefts and eating churros, not dying in the arms of a nebula with only his jaded mentor and a homicidal android for company. “I won’t be the reason you don’t eat.”

“Peter,” he murmured, and the kid froze. That was another thing he never did: use Peter’s name, his _actual_ name, “our oxygen is going to run out in a few days anyway. I’m not going to starve.”

Peter blinked up at him, mouth open as if to argue, and then he deflated. “Oh.”

He sat in silence for a few breaths, painfully conscious of how precious each one truly was, then Tony flicked the bag, which was still sitting untouched in Peter’s lap. “ _Eat_ , Parker. I’m not watching you die on an empty stomach.”

“What about you?”

_Nobody cares about me._

“You don’t worry about me, squirt.” He poked the kid’s shoulder. “That’s my job.”

And he couldn’t help but feel like he’d failed at it miserably.

\--

“He is dying.”

Tony flicked his paper football in Nebula’s direction, muffled a curse when he missed the goal, and tried not to look at the cot where Peter was sleeping, covered by a thin blanket, just a few feet away. “Yeah, well,” he cleared his throat, “we all are.”

Nebula’s eyes were creepy. They seemed to stare right through him, like the depth of the sea, the places where humans shouldn’t go. “I can survive longer than you two. My systems need only minimal sustenance and oxygen to function.”

“Well, woohoo for you.” She took a shot at his goal, and it sailed straight through. “Bet you can’t wait to be rid of us.”

“I do not want you to die,” she replied easily. “Nor will I take any pleasure in the death of your child.”

“What a sweet sentiment.”

Despite his earlier reservations, he found his eyes trailing over to Peter, baby-faced and _too fucking young_ to be fading like this. Too young to have been caught up in Tony’s trajectorial decay.

It hit him all at once that Peter would be perpetually young. He would never grow old, never lose the stutter in his speech, never kiss a girl, a boy, or a healthy mix of both. He would die like this: sixteen, brilliant, and just three gasps out from a life he should’ve had.

“You are afraid.”

The words dragged his attention away from the bed and back to Nebula. “What makes you think that?”

“I have seen many men die.” The way she said it sent shivers down his spine. Like this was a fact of life, the witnessing of mortality. Like death didn’t occur behind closed doors, wasn’t discussed in hushes and innuendoes. “They are always afraid.”

He didn’t like what that implied about Peter. Or, rather, he didn’t like how that confirmed the thing Tony had known for days, weeks.

Peter was terrified. He was a child, he was staring death in the face, and he was _terrified_.

“Aren’t _you_ afraid?” He asked, voice rough, desperate to steer the conversation in a direction that didn’t involve his failures.

“I have not been afraid to die for a long time.”

_Yeah_ , Tony thought, bitter smile forming on his lips, _I thought that, too._

\--

He recorded a message for Pepper while Peter was distracted.

He didn’t even think to let the kid make one for May, but he should’ve.

He should’ve.

\--

He didn’t remember falling asleep. He didn’t remember the past few hours at all, actually, but he was roused just vaguely by the feeling of cool, metal hands touching his face, moving him. He didn’t have the energy, the breath, the _anything_ to resist, just let his body slump into the touch and his mind drift.

There was a part of him that knew that this was death. Or, at least, a part of him that knew that this was the _beginning_ of death. He’d stepped a foot over the edge, and now he was falling.

It was funny, in a morbid sort of way, how he was too tired to care.

He was propped up against something hard. The edges of metal rubbed into his back, a distant discomfort that he barely even registered. Footsteps retreated, shuffled, returned.

Something warm was settled against his chest. Something gangly and firm and distinctly human shaped.

_Peter_.

The same robotic hands as before guided Tony’s arms up and around the kid, and there was a part of him still coherent enough to be thankful, to process the absolute tragedy that was playing out in real-time.

The oxygen was too thin, the days of starvation and dehydration throwing everything in double speed. Nebula would last longer than they would, still had some strength, and she was using it to lay this child in his arms, to ensure that neither of them succumbed to the inevitable alone.

He felt himself slipping again, felt Peter’s hair tickle his chin. The kid wasn’t moving, but he was warm, limp and soft. His breaths pushed up against Tony’s own ribs, steady and slow. He hadn’t given in yet, then. He was still alive. Still young. Still Peter.

He wondered if this was a hug. He wondered if that first one, that stupid blunder in the car, could count too.

He found that he didn’t really like the idea of their first and last hug being one and the same.

\--

Light flooded against Tony’s face: a kind of light that he hadn’t seen since Earth. Since home. Bright, beautiful, burning.

His eyes flickered open on more instinct than conscious intention. For a moment, his vision whited out, too overcome to focus.

It said a lot about his life that he was only mutedly surprised when the source of the glow turned out to be a woman, staring down at him with an expression full of fondness.

Peter shifted against him with a groan, legs kicking weakly. Without really thinking, Tony set a hand on the top of his head, and the kid stilled.

The woman smiled. “Need a lift?”

It took Tony three tries to wrestle his parched vocal cords into submission.

“Yeah,” he rasped, blinking a few times to see if the whole thing was some bullshit hallucination, “yeah, do you mind?”

“Not a bit.”

And then she was gone, the ship shuddered, creaked, _moved_.

The stars spun, and Tony had to shut his eyes against a wave of nausea, burying his face into Peter’s hair and swallowing back bile. It was his first taste of motion in weeks. A re-echo of hope.

With Peter’s limp weight pinning him down, Tony promised himself that he would never go to space again.

\--

Steve and Rhodey met them at the edge of the Milano’s ramp.

Nebula had to half-carry him off the ship. To save his pride, he assured himself that if he hadn’t been supporting Peter’s mostly-delirious weight, he could’ve easily walked on his own.

He also told himself that he handed Peter off to Rhodey because he trusted him with the kid, and not because he was too weak to resist.

Steve grabbed him, slid an arm around his waist and hoisted him up. It was the closest they’d been since… since before. Since Siberia. Since the sting of betrayal had become another pillar in Tony’s mansion in the sand.

“Tony,” he whispered.

He didn’t know how to respond to that tone, how to process the genuine relief in Steve’s voice, so he fell into something more familiar: guilt. “I couldn’t stop him.”

The set of Steve’s jaw stiffened. “Neither could I.”

He realized, a little belatedly, that Peter had been moved somewhere out of his sight, and he made a pitiful effort to free himself of Steve’s grasp to get back to him. “The kid. The-The kid. I came with a kid.”

“Right here, Tones.” Rhodey appeared at his side, Peter’s arm slung over his shoulder. The kid’s eyes were open and semi-focused, so Tony took that as a win. Let some of the tension resting in his muscles recede. “I’ve got him.”

“Pep?” She should be here. She would be here. It had been long enough, right? She would’ve come to the epicenter, gone reaching for the broken ends of the world and started gluing them back together. Pepper didn’t know how to let wreckage stay wrecked. Hell, look what she’d done with him. “Where’s Pepper?”

Steve and Rhodey shared a look that Tony understood immediately but refused to process, couldn’t process, would never be capable of truly processing.

_No._

“Let’s… Let’s get you inside, Tony,” Steve just said, grip around his waist tightening.

“Steve?” No. You know what? _Fuck_ Steve. He tried to tear away from him again, this time with significantly more vigor, and let his gaze fix on Rhodey. “Rhodey, where the _fuck_ is Pepper?”

The man just shook his head, face stone but eyes bleeding pity. “Fifty percent of _everyone_ , Tones. I’m… I’m so sorry.”

“No. No. _No_.” Steve’s grip went from supportive to restraining in a heartbeat, and he threw himself against the steel-still arms. He didn’t know what he planned to do if he escaped. He just knew that he had to. “No, she’s- maybe she went underground. Have you checked that? Checked-Checked the safe houses? There’s tons. I-there’s gotta be-”

Rhodey was still shaking his head, still denying, still toppling everything Tony had built his life on. “She was in a crisis meeting with twelve security reps, Tony. I reviewed the security footage myself. I’m so fucking sorry, man, but she’s… she got picked.”

The fight left him in a heartbeat. Everything around him warped, blurred. All he could see was her. Her hands in his hair, on his chest, down his back. Her perfume, her shampoo. Her voice, her eyes, the way she always kept a stylus tucked in the front pocket of her blazer. Pepper. Pepper. His Pepper.

_I have to protect the one thing that I can't live without. That's you._

He’d never wanted to see a world without Pepper Potts in it.

“Tony. _Tony_.” Rhodey grabbed his face, jerked it up until their eyes met. “Listen to me, man. You gotta…” He trailed off, shaking his head so minutely that Tony almost didn’t see it. “We’re gonna survive this, okay? But we have to go inside, we have to regroup. You need medical treatment, we need to-”

“I decline,” he rasped. “Don’t… Don’t fucking treat me. Just, just let me…”

_Just let me die._

“Tony,” Rhodey tilted his head until he was staring at Peter, head hanging low, barely conscious, barely alive, “Tony, _look_. Take a look around you. Don’t do this now, okay? Please.”

_Don’t do this in front of him._

He sagged against Steve’s chest. An emptiness was spreading inside him, the kind of void that was all-consuming. He wouldn’t survive this abyss. All it would take was time.

“Alright,” he whispered. “Fine. Fine. Just… let’s… let’s regroup.”

The words were hollow. Then again, so was he.

They staggered towards the distant Compound, Rhodey leading the way. He glanced back at Tony after a minute, adjusting his grip on Peter.

“We’re gonna figure this out, Tony. I promise.”

He nodded, but it felt like a lie. Rhodey’s promise wouldn’t make a difference. This time, there was no stringing the world back together.

Not when they were missing half the pieces.

\--

Steve and Rhodey dragged them both inside. A good bit of the original team seemed to have been spared. Steve, Rhodey, Natasha, Bruce, Thor. Nobody had heard from Clint, yet.

Steve forced him into a wheelchair, and he only allowed it so that Peter, who was starting to rouse a little bit more as the minutes passed, wouldn’t fight it. Rhodey hooked them both up to fluids, giving Tony a stern warning to _leave the damn IV alone, y’hear me?_ before stepping back to check Peter’s vitals.

“So,” Tony finally croaked, stilling his shaking hands by gripping the sides of his wheelchair, trying to push the never-ending flash of _Pepper_ into the back of his mind, “damage report?”

Natasha sighed. “It’s been 23 days since Thanos came to Earth. World governments are… in pieces. The parts that are still working are trying to take a census and it looks like he did… well, he did exactly what he said he was gonna do. Thanos wiped out 50% of all living creatures.”

_I knew that,_ Tony thought. _I watched it happen. I waited for it to take me. Or, even worse, I waited for it to take the kid._

He swallowed, adrenaline making his voice shaky, breathless. “Where is he now? Where?”

“We don’t know.” Steve’s voice made an angry fire light through Tony’s veins. “He just… opened a portal and walked through.”

He had to redirect before he lost it, before he had a breakdown, before he lunged out of his seat and threw a punch to Steve’s perfect nose. He pointed at Thor, who was sulking in a corner, in a frenzy, half interested and half desperate for distraction. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Oh, he’s pissed.” The raccoon responded, because _of course_ there was a talking racoon now. “He thinks he failed. Which, of course, he did, but, y’know, there’s a lot of that going around, ain’t there?”

_Yeah, there is._

The guilt was too much. The loss was too much. The concept of never holding Pepper again was just _too fucking much_.

“Honestly,” he quipped, bringing the sarcasm up like a shield, “until this exact second, I thought you were a Build-A-Bear.”

“Maybe I am.”

Steve sighed, brushing off Tony’s diversion just like he always did. “We’ve been hunting Thanos for three weeks now. Deep space scans and satellites, and we’ve got nothing.” Their eyes met, and there was something vulnerable and honest about the way Steve was staring at him that made the whole situation sit worse in his gut. “Tony, you fought him.”

He nearly laughed, hysteria rising. “Who told you that? I didn’t fight him, no, he wiped my face with a _planet_ while the Bleeker Street magician gave away the store.” He took a shaky breath. “That’s what happened. There’s no fight, because-”

Steve cut him off, exasperated. _Exasperated_ , like Tony hadn’t just watched _everything_ slip through his fingers. Like the _one goddamn thing he needed to survive_ hadn’t just been torn out of his hands. Like his grief was the tantrum of a child, a digression that needed to be corrected. “Did he give you any clues? Any coordinates? Anything?”

Tony brought a hand up to his temple, made the most childish noise he could think of, then let his voice fall solemn, hard. “Y’know, I saw this coming a few years back.” The anger was pushing against his teeth, the backbreaking strain of _I told you so_ aching in his throat. “I had a vision, I didn’t wanna believe it. I thought I was dreaming.”

“Tony,” and, of course, there was Steve, all misplaced American spirit and heroism, “I’m gonna need you to focus.”

“And I _needed_ you.” He spat. For the first time since the conversation began, Peter flinched beside him, looking up from where he’d been picking at his IV with wide eyes. It was almost enough to make Tony stop, step back, regroup. Almost. “As in, _past tense_. That trumps what you need.” His voice broke, and he did nothing to hide it. “It’s too late, buddy.” He paused, vision blurring with fury and exhaustion. “Sorry.”

He really wasn’t.

In a sudden rush of bone-grinding rage, he lashed out. Knocked down everything in front of him, heard the clatter and, god, it felt _good_. The breaking. The shattering. That’s what he wanted to do to Steve, to the team, to himself. It’s what Thanos had done to the world, after all. Why didn’t they just save him the effort of finishing the job?

“You know what I need?” He lunged drunkenly to his feet, swaying. He shoved off the hand Peter fumbled out for his wrist with only a distant pang of regret. “I need a shave.”

He was distantly aware of Rhodey rushing closer, saying his name as he tore out his IV in a brutal yank, trying to calm him, but it was all useless. It was all _pointless_. Pepper was _dead_. Pepper was _gone_. They had _lost_. Why the hell was Steve still acting like there was a chance?

Tony Stark had run out of chances. He just wanted them to leave him alone long enough to die, like he’d always been destined to.

That was the end of his story, right? Death. It’s where he’d been headed all along. One last sacrifice, one last defeat. For a while now, his only tether had been Pepper. His love for her, his inability to cause her harm.

But that was gone, now. Nothing to hold him back, nothing to steady himself on.

He staggered a little, but righted himself. “And I believe I remember _telling_ you guys,” he brushed Rhodey’s continued interjections off, pressed forward like this was the last thing he’d ever do, the last words he’d ever speak, “that what _we_ needed was a suit of armor around the world, remember that? Whether it impacted our precious freedoms, or not, that’s what we _needed_.”

The look on Steve’s face was just as patronizing as he’d expected it to be, and his tone matched. “Well that didn’t work out, did it?”

“I said we’d lose.” He pointed an accusing finger in Steve’s direction. This was the strongest he’d felt in weeks, in months, in _years_. He was sure that he could tear the soldier apart with his bare hands, no suit needed. “You said, we’ll do that together, too. And guess what, Cap? We lost, and you weren’t there.” Tony felt himself start to stumble. Rhodey stepped forward to steady him, still murmuring his name, still trying to talk him down. “That’s what we do, right?” He pressed on. “Our best work after the fact? The _A_ vengers? We’re the _A_ vengers, not the _Pre_ vengers. Right?”

“You made your point,” Rhodey begged, hands firm and steady on his chest, “now just sit down, okay?”

“No, no, _here’s_ my point.” He switched his point to the new girl, who girl with the light, as Rhodey worked to wrestle him back into the wheelchair. “She’s great, by the way.” She took the praise silently, expression unreadable. “We need you. You’re new blood.” He finally broke away from Rhodey’s grip and stalked towards Steve, pushing himself right up in his face. “We’re a bunch of tired old meals, I got _nothing_ for you, Cap.”

Who did Steve Rogers think he was, anyway?

Who the hell were _any_ of them? A bunch of sad, washed-up _failures_.

A dying breed. Something that should’ve been extinguished a long, long time ago.

He could see that, now. Saw it clearer than he’d ever seen anything else in his life. The Avengers weren’t heroes, weren’t humanity’s greatest defense. They _were_ the problem.

Maybe they always had been.

“I got no coordinates,” he snarled, breath coming in short pants, “no clues, no strategies, no options, zero, zip, nada. No trust.”

He was distantly aware of the adrenaline deserting him, of the shaking in his limbs becoming overwhelming, of the lights blurring in the periphery of his vision, but he pushed it aside, stared right into Steve’s eyes with as much hatred as he could muster.

“ _Liar_ ,” he spat.

He tore off the nanotech housing unit, the pain of wires tearing from flesh only vaguely registering, and shoved it into Steve’s palm, hoping with everything he had that he’d mustered up enough force for the impact to hurt, to sting.

“Here,” he growled, “take this. You find him, you put that on, you _hide_.”

In a blink, the world spun. One second, he was standing. The next, his knees were making rough contact with the floor. Over the rushing in his ears, he thought he heard Steve cry out his name in aborted alarm.

“I’m fine,” he snapped, knowing with every fiber of his being that he could never be _fine_ again. “I’m-”

The world dropped out from underneath him.

\--

When Tony first woke up, he purposefully didn’t move.

He knew, from the sterile smell and the distinct beeping of a heart monitor, that he was in the MedBay. And from the memories he drudged up from the haze in his head, the context of how he got there wasn’t difficult to deduce.

“Tony,” Rhodey’s voice was quiet, but firm, “I know you’re awake.”

He hated having his vitals posted up where everyone could see them. It really cramped his vibe.

“Hey, Rhodes,” he croaked, still not opening his eyes.

“Hey to you too, man.”

He decided to focus on just about the only thing he actually gave a shit about. “Where’s the kid?”

“Open your eyes and find out.”

Well, that was just a low blow.

Still, he forced his gritty eyelids open, squinting at the light, and dragged his gaze around the room until it landed on a couch in the corner.

Peter Parker was curled up there, fast asleep, covered by a thin hospital-issue blanket and head resting on a throw pillow. Someone had dragged an IV stand next to him, and Tony could just barely see the dressing for the cannula on the back of the kid’s hand.

“Is he alright?” Tony whispered.

“Define _alright_.”

He pulled his eyes back to Rhodey, who was sitting in a plastic chair placed right beside his bed. His concern for the kid’s safety was pushing uncomfortably at the ever-hungry grief that had taken up a permanent residence in his chest. “What do you mean by that?”

“You know, you two are too damn alike for your own good.” Rhodey dragged a hand down the front of his face, words laced with the kind of exhaustion that Tony could relate to. The exhaustion of defeat. “Once you passed out, the kid nearly had a breakdown of his own. He actually held off on it, though, until he asked for his aunt and we had to tell him. We just sedated both of you, after that. Seemed easier that way.”

Something cold raced through Tony’s body. “Is she…?”

“Yeah. She’s gone, man.” Rhodey leaned forward, expression so serious that it made Tony want to flinch away. “Do you know what that means?”

“What, that the kid’s an orphan all over again?” He scoffed. “He can join the club.”

Rhodey ignored the snark. “Don’t play dumb, Tony. You know exactly what I mean.”

“I really don’t.” He did. Every time he got in the realm of acknowledging it, he flinched away, but he _did_ know, and it terrified him. “Please elaborate.”

Rhodey watched him for a few long, heavy moments. “It means that you’re the last person on Earth who can give that kid what he needs right now.”

“And what’s that?”

“A home,” Rhodey said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

He nearly snorted. “I’m the last person that a child needs in his life right now.” He had to bite his lip to stop himself from trembling. “I should’ve died on that ship.”

“If you had,” Rhodey murmured gently, “then Peter would’ve, too.”

“Maybe it would’ve been for the best.” Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. Knew there wasn’t a single version of reality where the world could keep spinning with that kid dead. “I mean, what’s gonna happen to the kid now? Is CPS still a thing? He’s got nowhere to go.”

“What’d I just say, Tony?” Rhodey actually had the gall to look exasperated. “ _You’re_ gonna take him.”

“Since when did I agree to that?”

“You’re about to.”

His anger from before sparked back up. It was easier to face the world that way, through a lens of fury. “I don’t plan on being _alive_ by the end of the week, Rhodes, why the hell are you suggesting I take on a _child_?”

The man flinched at the admission. “You won’t go through with it.”

“Watch me.”

“God, Tony. Listen to me.” Rhodey leaned forward in his seat, folded his hands on the edge of the mattress. “I’m not gonna sit here and feed you some bullshit about everything being alright. You’re too smart for that. But I _am_ gonna give you the facts, and the facts are that you brought that kid into this fight. You did that, Tony. And now he’s all alone, and you’re the only adult left on this planet who can protect him in the aftermath. Even if you don’t keep your ass alive because of anything else, at least do it out of duty.” _Or guilt,_ Tony thought, hands clenching. “You’re the only thing that kid has left. Don’t you dare abandon him now.”

He turned his gaze back to Peter, still sleeping, still blissfully unaware of the horror his life had become.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he admitted, voice small.

“You have to try.” He could hear Rhodey shift in his seat, a tinge of desperation in his voice. “And if you don’t, I’ll kick your ass, because I know for a fact that that kid is too damn sweet to do it himself.”

Peter shifted a little, nose crumpling up for a just a split second before he resettled, and Tony felt despair sweep through him.

“Oh, god, I have to do this, don’t I?” It was worse when he said it aloud, because the truth in the words shone through, piercingly clear. “I really have to do this. I can’t just…” He looked back at Rhodey, seeking… something from him. Reassurance? Permission? Sympathy? “I have to do this.”

“Yeah, Tones,” Rhodey seemed to deflate with relief, sinking back into his chair on an exhale, “you do.”

Tony had never heard anything more beautiful and nauseating in the entire course of his life.


	2. For Another To Start

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Am I not your parent?_ He thought, heard cracking, aching, shuddering under the weight. _Who signed those adoption papers even as their world was fraying at every edge? Who pulled an all-nighter helping you put your final college applications together the day before the deadline? Who cheered the loudest at your graduation? Who held you when that MJ girl broke up with you for Stanford? Who wiped your face from vomit in the aftermath of your first frat party?_
> 
> He’d spent nearly every single second of the last five years pouring himself into this kid, this child. Somewhere along the lines, Tony’s happiness become intrinsically linked to Peter’s. He needed him. He was the only goddamn reason to keep dragging himself through day after day, to open his eyes in the morning, to take consecutive breaths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *has finals*  
> *writes nearly 7k update*  
> is this a good use of my time?  
> (p.s. I finished this chapter with the remnants of a migraine so please be kind)

_5     YEARS     LATER_

\--

“Tony! I’m home!”

He glanced up from his iPad as he heard the unmistakable sounds of Peter chucking his keys into the door side bowl and kicking his shoes into the closet. “I’m in the living room, kid!”

“Coming!”

A few seconds later, and Peter was vaulting over the back of the couch and landing beside him with a tiny _oof_.

He frowned to hide his amusement. “How many times do I have to tell you that the furniture is not your jungle gym, Parker?”

“Try again and we’ll see if it sticks.” Before he could answer, Peter was peeking at the schematics pulled up on his tablet’s screen. “Ooh. Are you working on BARF again?”

“Just tinkering.” He tossed the iPad aside, and saw Peter do the same with his phone. This was their routine: swap stories with zero distractions, just… exist with each other for a while. “How was class?”

“Good, yeah,” Peter’s head bobbed, “kinda dull in parts, but fine. Nothing wild.”

“No new stories from Thermo?”

“Not really. Quinn was actually kinda tame today. He only talked about his cat for, like, fifteen minutes of lecture. Maybe he’s evolving.”

“Well, that would be a shame. 90% of my daily entertainment comes from listening to you bitch about him.”

“I do not _bitch_.”

Oh, god. This kid. This _precious_ kid, this kid that fate had just plopped right into his lap. It was moments like these when the grief settled, stagnated, and he could revel in this happiness he’d found in the aftermath. The absolute _miracle_ he’d claimed for himself. “Sure you don’t, buddy.”

“I don’t!”

“That’s what I just said, squirt.” He narrowed his eyes in false confusion. “Why’re you repeating it?”

“I hate you.”

“You absolutely do not,” he countered.

Peter didn’t argue.

He did, however, slump in his seat, gaze wandering up to a corner and going just a little too distant, a little to contemplative. Tony’s heart constricted.

“Hey.” That one word had Peter jolting back to him, eyes latching onto Tony like a tether. “How are we doing?”

“It’s a… it’s kinda a middle day.”

He nodded. They had these moments, too. Days when Tony could handle it on days when Peter couldn’t, and vice versa. The best days were the ones when they could both face the sunlight without guilt. The worst were when neither could.

But, somehow, they’d built something worthwhile out of all of them.

“That’s alright. We can do a middle day.” He held out an arm, and Peter immediately ducked underneath it, curling up against his ribs. “Is it this weekend that’s bothering you? You don’t have to come with me, y’know. You can stay here.”

“No, no.” Peter squished his cheek against Tony’s collarbone, warm breath skimming over the exposed skin on his neck. “I wanna go. I can’t hide from the city forever. It’s just…”

“Memories,” Tony finished.

“Yeah.”

“Not all bad memories though, right?” He brushed a few stray baby hairs out of Peter’s face, ducking to catch his gaze. “Good memories, too.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The kid shook his head, ridding himself of the sadness in a split second. When he looked back at Tony, some of the weightiness in his gaze had lifted. “Good memories.”

_Like this one,_ Tony thought, drinking in every inch of Peter’s face. _Definitely this one._

“Good.” It hurt to pull away, but they couldn’t linger on the couch all day. They used to. Used to cower under blankets and denial until Rhodey came and dragged them back to reality. Tony would never let Peter go back there again. He _couldn’t_.

He stood, headed towards the kitchen, then stopped dead and spun back to the couch. “Wait, almost forgot.” He leaned down and cupped Peter’s cheek, tilting his face upward so he could press a light kiss to his forehead. “I love you, y’know that? You ran out before I could say it this morning.”

Peter scrunched up his nose and immediately started trying to squirm out of his grip. “Ew.”

“Hey!” He feigned hurt, and slapped Peter on the knee for good measure. “Say it back!”

The kid laughed, eyes sparkling. “Yeah, yeah, fine. I love you too, Tony.”

“Good boy.” He poked him in the ribs, pointed towards the backdoor. “Now c’mon, get up. I’m thinking steaks for dinner? It’s nice and warm outside, so we can grill ‘em and eat by the lake.” He snapped his fingers when he remembered the other thing he’d wanted to talk to the kid about when he got home. “Which _also_ reminds me that we can probably put the boat in next weekend. How’s that sound? We can do it Saturday and spend all Sunday out on the water.”

Peter followed him outside, taking in a deep breath of the fresh air and relaxing into it. “Oh, yeah, that’d be nice.”

Peter loved the lake. Loved the woods, the dock, the winding mountain roads. Sometimes, on nights when neither of them could sleep through the PTSD and ghosts of people that shouldn’t be dead, they would lay out on the porch and watch the stars, let the wind rustle their pajamas. In the worst darknesses, it was the only way Tony could soothe the kid to sleep, shoulders brushing and backs pressed against the stiff wooden boards. The habit certainly wasn’t the best for his back, but ending the night with Peter’s sleep-slowed breathing was always worth the double dose of ibuprofen he’d need in the morning.

“You don’t have any exams you need to be studying for that day, do you?”

The kid hopped up onto the picnic table while Tony started prepping the grill, swinging his legs and watching his movements almost lazily. “No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s a plan, then.” He set the grill on preheat. “Hey, you wanna run inside and grab a couple of steaks? And some plates, please.”

There were a few seconds where Peter didn’t answer.

“Kid? You hear me?”

“No, yeah, sorry. I heard you. It’s just…”

He didn’t turn away from the grill. “What?”

“Uh, we have visitors?”

It was strange, the way the mind catalogs reflexes, builds filing cabinets of traumas. Tony hadn’t been in the line of fire since Titan, had lived the most boring, mundane life since then, and yet at those words, every single protective instinct flared up in the span of a single heartbeat.

He swung around, grill abandoned, and immediately stepped between Peter and the danger. Except, as his brain caught up with his actions, he realized that it _wasn’t_ danger.

At least, not that kind.

It was Steve, Nat, and, well, a _dead man_ , technically.

Scott Lang.

“Rogers,” he greeted, inclining his head and stepping to the side, letting them get a full look at Peter. “Romanoff. Oh, and Lang, of course. You know, last I checked,” he pointed in Scott’s direction, “weren’t you dead?”

“Yeah, well, I mean, no,” Scott laughed, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. In a way, he reminded Tony of Peter: a puppy stumbling over his own feet in his need to impress. “Not dead, exactly, just-”

Steve cut him off, voice tense. “Tony, can we talk?”

“Is this an _inviting me to a dinner party_ talk or a _there’s a mission and I need your help_ talk?”

“The latter.”

He swallowed, fists clenching out of an age-old reflex. Fucking _of course_ it would be Rogers of all people who would try to snatch this away from him. “Sorry, Cap. Answer’s same as it’s always been. _No_.”

Peter stepped toward him. “Tony-”

God. He couldn’t stand the kid being a liaison right now. Couldn’t stand his ability to make people meet in the middle. “Go inside, Pete.”

“But Tony-”

“I think it’s best, son,” Steve said, gaze still fixed on his. “This is between us.”

He nodded. Yes. Good idea. Get Peter as far away from this as possible, and then send Steve and the world-shattering danger that the Avengers always seemed to drag in their wake running for the hills.

The Avengers had taken _everything_ from him. They couldn’t have this, too. Tony wouldn’t let them.

They couldn’t have Peter.

“For once, kid, listen to Cap. I’ll be fine.”

He watched Peter hesitate out of the corner of his eye, twitching his hands and glancing in nearly every possible direction before huffing and letting out a defeated nod. “Fine. But you have, like, ten minutes, and then I’m coming out to rescue you.”

Despite everything, the smile came easily. “I’m counting on it, buddy.”

Letting Peter leave was always hard. It was strange to think that when they’d first moved into the cabin, he’d skirted around the kid, tried to isolate himself from the magnitude of the responsibility he’d taken on. Now, he threw himself at any opportunity to linger in Peter’s presence. They spent a lot less time together ever since the kid had started college, and Tony found his days stretching out with loneliness.

All that Tony had was Peter. That was it. Tony and Peter, the ones left behind.

Once the door to the house swung shut, Tony swiped aside the thoughts and spun to glare at Steve. “What do you want, Rogers? You’re interrupting dinner.”

“Tony, please. I didn’t come here to fight,” Steve pleaded. “I just want to talk to you.”

“Yeah?” He raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Then talk.”

He didn’t want to be this standoffish, really. It was just the only defense he could formulate. He didn’t like reminders of what used to be. It made the loss sting more fiercely.

And if there was anything that reminded Tony of _before_ , it was Steve Rogers.

“We think we may have found something.” Natasha had a spark in her eyes that was hard to find, these days. The spark of life, of wanting to _live_ , not just survive. “A way to bring everybody back.”

He went tense all at once, shoved aside the part of him that wanted to believe it. No. _No_. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t think about a chance, about _her_. Couldn’t let himself even entertain the possibility. There was nothing that could come of it but the void, caverns of depression and mornings spent wallowing in bed.

He’d spent too long in those places, and he would never make Peter drag him out of them again.

“Oh?” He pushed as much disbelief into his voice as possible, purposefully flippant. “And what would that be?”

“Well,” Scott started, “it kinda, well, I mean, it sort of starts with me.”

“Yeah, let’s start there,” he drawled. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“I wasn’t actually, uh, one of the people Thanos, well, one of the ones that Thanos _you know_.” Scott winced, but Tony stayed stone cold. “I was stuck in the quantum realm, and I just got out, and I think that _that_ could be our answer.”

He narrowed his eyes, “Define _that_.”

“I was in the quantum realm for five years in your time, right? But for me, it was only five hours.”

Tony nodded, still unimpressed. “Yeah, yeah. Time works differently at the subatomic scale. We already _know_ that, Scott.”

“But don’t you know what that means?” Scott was practically bouncing in front of him, and Tony tried not to find it annoying even though it really, really was. “If we could find a way to… a way to _manipulate_ that, then we could, well, we could, for lack of a better word, we could _time travel_.”

Tony barked out a laugh. “You’re kidding.” He looked between Steve, Nat, back to Scott. None of them seemed to share in his amusement. “Oh, my god. You’re _not_ kidding. You are… you actually think that _time travel_ -”

“No, trust me, _please_.” God, every time Scott spoke it just reminded him more and more of Peter. And, unfortunately for them, it wasn’t helping their case. It just kept forcing him to stare in the face exactly what he had to lose. “We… We know what this sounds like.”

Steve leapt in, as calm as collected as usual. “Tony, after everything you’ve seen, is anything really impossible?”

He was cutting the man off before he could finish. “Quantum fluctuation messes with the Planck scale, which then triggers the Deutsch Proposition. Can we all agree on that?” They all stared at him for a second, and he huffed out a tired sigh. “In layman’s terms, it means that you’re not coming home.”

Scott leapt in, indignant. “I did.”

“No,” he snapped. “You accidentally survived. It’s a million to one cosmic fluke. And now you wanna pull a… a what do you call it?”

“A… time heist,” Scott said, although it sounded a lot more like a question.

It also sounded _absolutely ridiculous_.

They wanted him to bank _this_ , this house, this family, this life, this stability he had managed to polish up in the aftermath, on something they called a _time heist?_

Yeah. No. Wasn’t happening.

“Yeah,” he chuckled to himself, “a time heist. Of course.” He looked to Steve. “Why didn’t we think of this before? Oh, because it’s laughable? Because it’s a pipe dream?”

“The Stones are in the past. We could go back, we could get them.”

Natasha nodded. “We can snap our own fingers, we can bring everybody back.”

They said it like it was easy, like they weren’t suggesting a suicide mission.

He grit his teeth against the temptation to shout. “Or screw it up worse than he already has, right?”

Steve shifted, uncomfortable but unyielding. “I don’t believe we would.”

“Gotta say that sometimes I miss that giddy optimism.” _I just wish you’d censor it with some logic every once in a while._ “However, high hopes won’t help if there’s no logical, tangible way for me to safely execute said,” he groaned inwardly as he parroted back Scott’s earlier phrasing, “ _time heist_.”

God, he hadn’t wanted this today. Hadn’t wanted this _ever_. He just wanted to make some steaks, sit with Peter on the dock, watch the sunset, listen to a detailed account of everything that popped into the kid’s head, revel in the sensation of being loved, being needed.

He didn’t want Steve to come and bring back old memories, for him _or_ for the kid. He knew that there would be a rush of nightmares for the both of them, tonight, and he resented the intrusion.

He sank back against the picnic table, shrugging helplessly. “I believe the most likely outcome will be our collective demise.”

Scott rushed forward, getting way more into Tony’s personal space than he allowed for anyone besides Peter. “Not if we strictly follow the rules of time travel. That means, no talking to our past selves, no betting on sporting events-”

He held out a hand, exasperation rising. “I’m gonna stop you right there, Scott. Are you seriously telling me that your plan to save the universe is based on Back to the Future? Is it?”

Scott scoffed, but looked a little sheepish. “ _No_.”

“Good. You had me worried there, cause that’d be horseshit.” He sighed. “That’s not how quantum physics _works_.”

“Tony,” he glanced up at Natasha’s voice, “we have to take a stand.”

Her eyes were bleeding the kind of desperation that Tony was just… too tired to dredge up anymore. He might’ve related to it, in the first year without Pepper. Even now, he could feel the remnants of it weighing at the bottom of his stomach. But he’d… he’d moved on from it. Locked it away. Drowned it in favor of pouring everything he had into raising Peter.

It had been better, that way, more tolerable. He knew that it was what Pepper would’ve wanted him to do. She had spent all her life trying to get him to stop. Tony acknowledged the irony that it took her death to finally achieve it.

He wasn’t going to let her down now.

“We did stand,” he said, voice low, “and yet here we are.”

For the first time since arriving, Scott’s expression seemed to grow serious, not a trace of humor left. He reached out to grip Tony’s knee, but aborted the movement when he flinched away.

“I know you’ve got a lot on the line,” he tried. “You’ve got this life, you’ve got a son. But I lost someone very important to me,” Scott said it like Tony _hadn’t_. Like he didn’t spend nearly every night falling asleep in a bed that was so empty, so void, so lacking in the body heat of the one person he had wanted to spend an eternity with, “a lot of people did, and now, _now_ , we have a chance to bring her back, to bring everybody back, and you’re telling me that you won’t even-”

“That’s right, Scott,” the admission hurt, but it was true, “I won’t even.” His eyes flickered to the porch as the door squeaked open. “I _can’t_.”

“Your, uh,” Peter leaned out from the doorframe and glanced between them all, forever shy, “your ten minutes are up.”

He smiled. _That’s my boy._

“Alright, bud, I’m coming,” he called. He dragged his gaze back to Steve, and felt himself soften. Five years did a lot for healing, and something about Peter had gentled him. He wasn’t so quick to anger, anymore. The glow of a grudge just… wasn’t as enticing as it used to be. “Listen,” he murmured, low, genuine, “I wish you had come here to ask me something else, anything else. I’m honestly happy to see you guys, I just…”

_I just can’t risk him. Not for anything. Not for you, not for the greater good._

_Not even for Pepper._

_(And I hate myself for that.)_

He stood, brushing off the invisible vice snarling around his throat, ready to go inside, cook some dinner, hug his child, until Steve stepped in the way.

“Tony, I get it,” the soldier’s eyes darted to Peter, still waiting on the porch, and back again, “and I’m happy for you, I really am, but this is… this is a second chance.”

He thought about the immediate aftermath, about hunkering down in the penthouse, surrounded by Pepper’s designs, Pepper’s clothes, Pepper’s smell. He thought about how often he’d wished that Thanos had just killed him, about how _twisted_ the Titan’s concept of mercy had truly been. He thought about how easy it would’ve been to die, how welcome the embrace would have felt to his battered soul.

But then he thought about Peter, about how the kid had crawled right past his defenses and curled up in the center of his fortress, acting as if Tony’s world was a home and not a prison. He thought about the first time he’d smiled, _really_ smiled, in the _after_ , and how that had been all Peter. He thought about how warm the kid was when he fell asleep in his arms, how complete he felt in those tiny moments of togetherness.

“I’ve got my second chance right here, Cap,” he whispered, voice cracking. “Can’t roll the dice on it.” He pushed forward, shouldering Steve out of his path. “If you don’t talk shop, you can stay for dinner.”

\--

Steve and his gang hadn’t stayed for dinner. Tony didn’t know whether to be grateful for that or not. On the bright side, it meant that Peter hadn’t had to opportunity to grill Steve for the details of his plan. On the not-so-bright side, it made the kid even more suspicious.

“What were they even here for, anyway?” Peter questioned around a mouthful of steak. “Like, is it a tech thing?”

“No,” he said, turning away from cleaning the grill just long enough to point threateningly at Peter’s plate, “now eat your dinner.”

“I _am_ eating.”

“Then eat quietly, please.”

“You’d be worried if I did that.”

“It’s because you’ve rarely been quiet in your life.” _Except for after,_ he thought, throat tightening, _you’d just stare at the wall for hours, dead silent, no words, like you’d been emptied_. _Please never be that silent again._ “It’s disconcerting.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “ _Tony_. Quit changing the subject. Captain American and Black Widow just, like, showed up on our doorstep, and you want me to just… _not_ wonder why?”

“I expect you to trust me when I tell you that it’s none of your business.”

“I’m not a kid.”

_That’s all I see when I look at you, Peter. A child. My child. The precious life that I’ve been given to protect._ “I’m well aware.”

“Then _tell me_.”

He let out a long-suffering sigh, then threw his hands up in defeat, abandoning his cleaning job in favor of turning around to look at Peter. “They were here about time travel,” he said finally, watching the kid’s face for a reaction.

He got one, for sure. Peter’s expression crumpled in confusion, then defiance. He crossed his arms, moping. “Fine, then don’t tell me.”

“Peter, I _am_ telling you. They were here to ask me to build them a time machine out of some half-assed quantum physics.”

Peter laughed, loud and abrupt. “What? That’s… That’s ridiculous. Time travel isn’t possible. Messing with anything in the quantum realm would screw up the Planck scale, and that’s totally gonna invoke the Deutsch Propo-”

He grinned. These were the moments when he realized why strangers genuinely mistook them as biological father and son, and he _loved_ them. “The Deutsch Proposition. Yeah, Pete, I know, and that’s almost exactly what I told them.”

The kid watched him quietly for a few heartbeats. “So no time travel?”

“No, kid. No time travel.”

“Huh.” Peter paused, poking at his half-eaten steak with his fork. “What does Captain American want with time travel, though?”

“Nothing,” he said. It must’ve been a little too quick, too, because Peter’s gaze darted up to his face and there was a frightening look of understanding in his eyes.

“Oh. So it was about _that_.”

_That_. A deflector, a euphemism, a way to dance around the event that, even five years in the past, still haunted them.

“Yeah, buddy.” He sighed, leaning back against the grill with exhaustion in every inch of his limbs. “It was about _that_.”

He could see the wheels churning in Peter’s head, could see him tearing through the available data, drawing closer and closer to the inevitable solution.

Sometimes, Tony wished Peter wasn’t so smart. He knew how much of a burden it could be. The weight of understanding, of brilliance. For the rest of his life, Peter would be expected to be _more_. To push harder, faster. To innovate. Subpar would never be a word that existed in his vocabulary, and Tony was terrified that he would buckle underneath the expectations.

And, on a more selfish level, Tony hated that Peter’s brain would always be able to comprehend the extreme. The bliss of ignorance didn’t exist for people like them, and it was hard to protect a child that could see straight through comforting lies.

He could see the dreaded moment that the pieces finally clicked together in the kid’s head.

“Wait,” Peter set his fork down, dinner forgotten, “they wanna go back and kill Thanos, don’t they? Or… Or stop him from getting the stones?”

“Close, but not quite.” He tossed his rag on the back of the grill and turned his full attention to Peter. “They wanted to go back in time and collect the Stones before Thanos destroyed them.”

Peter’s eyes widened. “And then we could snap our fingers, and _bam_ , everyone’s back.”

“Except,” he added gently, “it’s not possible, Pete. You just pointed it out yourself. It’s… It’s a nice idea, but it’s not one that has a chance of working.”

“But… But couldn’t we at least _try_ , right?” He hated the hope in Peter’s eyes. Even more, he hated that he was the one who put it there. “I mean, maybe it _could_ work, we don’t know, there could always be something that we’re-”

“It _won’t work_ , Peter!” He snarled, pushing forward and slammed his hands on the picnic table.

The kid’s mouth clicked shut, gaze falling, shoulders slumping.

“Oh. Oh, Peter, I’m sorry.” He stumbled around the table until he could slide onto the bench beside the kid, hand fumbling up to grip the back of his neck in a silent apology. “Hey, I’m _sorry_. I didn’t mean to snap at you, you know I don’t like it when I do that. I just wasn’t-”

“Tony, it’s alright.” Peter shot him a shy smile. “I was being annoying anyway.”

“No, you weren’t. You were just…”

“Desperate,” Peter finished.

“Yeah, maybe. But, _buddy_ ,” he cupped Peter’s face, swiped a thumb across the soft skin of his cheek. The kid’s eyes drifted shut at the contact, a long sigh drawing from his chest, “that’s okay. We’re… we’re _all_ a little desperate. We’ve been desperate for a while.”

Peter sniffed, nodding slowly against his palm. For a handful of seconds, they just breathed, warm and connected.

“I miss her,” the kid finally whispered, wet and young. “I miss her so much.”

Tony nodded, pulse pounding in his ears. “I know you do, buddy.”

“And I… I know you miss Pepper, too.”

“I do,” he admitted, voice rough, “every single day. But, Peter,” he tipped the kid’s face up, tapped his cheekbone until he opened his eyes and met his gaze, “this isn’t a way. It’s harebrained, badly planned. It’s not even scientifically _feasible_.”

Peter nodded, eyes brimming with tears. “I just… I wish you could bring them back.”

“I do too, kid.” And he did. He loved what he’d found, but it’d been a million times better with Pepper at his side. “But there’s no point chasing ghosts, and that’s all that this plan is.” He dropped his forehead against Peter’s, closing his eyes, breathing in the moment. “It’s just chasing ghosts.”

\--

It wasn’t long after dinner that Peter declared that he was going to bed.

Tony wasn’t overly surprised. Since starting college, the kid kept a much healthier sleep schedule than Tony ever had in his _life_. He was pretty sure that was abnormal, if he remembered anything from his college years, but he never knocked it.

Plus, the emotional impact of the day was bound to be taking its toll. As a general rule, they didn’t talk about _before_. Today was the most they’d delving into the memories in a long, long time.

And, as an unfortunate result, he didn’t expect Peter to sleep for long. It would probably only be a few hours before they both ended up in Tony’s bed, or on the couch, or, if it was a really bad night, sprawled out on the front porch.

Tony started on the dishes after telling him goodnight. It was technically Peter’s turn, but the kid had forgotten and he wasn’t going to hold him to it. While he was spraying down one of the plates, a stray stream shot off into one of the nearby shelves. He shut off the water with a muffle groan, toweling down the plate and shoving it onto the drying rack he and Peter had bought on one of their impromptu Ikea adventures last summer. He absentmindedly grabbed one of the frames that had taken the brunt of the water, intending to dry it off too, then paused.

Most of the photos around the house were of Peter, although he’d let the kid sneak a couple of Tony in there as well. He knew that the kid had a few pictures of May in his bedroom. They’d only recently emerged, as if he’d finally worked up the courage to stare her in the face again.

Nearly all of the photos Tony had of Pepper were digital, tucked away in one of F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s priority archives. This frame, however, was one of the few possessions that had migrated from the Tower to the cabin. The rest had all gone into storage, too painful to touch.

It was a photo Rhodey had taken, actually, so long ago now that it felt like a daydream. It was during the first official year of his and Pepper’s relationship, before everything had gone wrong and right and wrong again. Pepper had her chin resting on Tony’s shoulders, eyes locked on whatever it was he was doing on his StarkPad. Tony’s eyes were bright, alive, the kind of smile only Pepper could coax shining out from his face.

It had been one of her favorites. She used to point at it, sometimes, and remind him that this was the man she thought of him as. Not Tony Stark, the weapons dealer. Not Tony Stark, the playboy. Not even Tony Stark, the face behind Iron Man. No, she saw him as just this: Tony Stark, the man she fell in love with.

It was the only version of himself that he’d ever wanted to be.

The grief hit him like a tidal wave, as it sometimes did. Five years did wonders, but it didn’t do enough. He loved her. He missed her. He wanted her back.

He’d do just about _anything_ to get her back.

Something sparked inside him. Something hot, bold, _frightening_.

It was the same thing he’d seen in Natasha earlier, the same thing that had radiated out from Peter’s face later, the same thing that had sent terrified chills down his spine.

It was the want to do more than survive, to get by.

It was the want to _live_.

It was hope.

\--

It took him approximately 20 minutes to crack time travel.

Sometimes, he scared even himself.

\--

He collapsed onto the couch, completed and _successful_ time travel schematics still projected on the hologram table (the one that was mostly used by Peter nowadays), and dropped his head into his hands.

“ _Shit_ ,” he whispered.

There was a light creaking from the bottom on the stairs, as if in response, and then a voice.

“What’s wrong?”

He jolted, looking over to see Peter sitting on the bottom step, watching him with sleep-glazed eyes, chin propped up in his hand.

“Peter,” he gasped. He reached out a hand, beckoning without conscious thought. Drawing the kid closer and closer, forever pulling him in. “C’mere. What’re you doing up?”

The kid wandered over to the couch and crawled up, twisting to face Tony and drawing his knees up to his chest. “Couldn’t sleep, ‘s not a big deal.” From the tortured look in Peter’s eyes, Tony could tell that it was, in fact, a _very_ big deal. “What’re you doing, though? Is something wrong?”

He hadn’t wanted to admit it, certainly hadn’t planned to. It went against every paternal instinct he had. The child was meant to be sheltered from the bigger picture, not thrust into it because his parent couldn’t keep his existential panic to himself.

But the realization of what he’d done, what he could do _now_ , was tearing him up, and Peter was the only person he had left. The only person he could tell. The only person who could _understand_.

“I figured it out,” he blurted, regret already rising.

Peter’s forehead crinkled in surprise and confusion. “And, you know, just so we’re talking about the same thing…”

“Time travel,” he clarified in a strained whisper.

“What?” For a second, it looked like Peter was going to pull back. Then, he seemed to reverse the decision, and just leaned closer. “Wow,” he breathed. “That’s… that’s _amazing_.”

_And terrifying_ , he added silently.

“That’s right.”

“So… we have to, we have to go to the Compound now, right?” The sleep had been driven from Peter’s eyes, replaced with a stronger version of the hope Tony had seen in them earlier. More voracious this time, harder to dismiss. “I mean, this is huge. This is… this is _crazy_. Cap’s plan, it might… it could actually work now, right?” A huge smile sprawled across the kid’s face. “We can bring them back. We can bring them _all_ back.”

“Maybe.”

Peter jolted. “What do you mean, _maybe_?”

“I mean that maybe we shouldn’t do this, bud.” There was something clawing in his chest: the wounded animal that had never truly healed. The one that wanted nothing more than to retract inside its shell and _cower_. The one that knew that the danger was never truly gone, just lurking in his blind spots. “Maybe I should just… let it die.”

There was genuine shock on Peter’s face, as if the kid couldn’t even begin to comprehend anything that had just come out of Tony’s mouth. “Why?”

“This isn’t going to be a walk in the park, Peter. This is… this is going to be dangerous. _Life-endingly_ dangerous. And… and we could still fail. We could screw it up worse than it already is. We could lose _everything_. All of it.”

“It doesn’t matter if we could fail.” Peter’s eyes were so young, so full of foolhardy belief. Sometimes, it took Tony’s breath away. “We still have to try. Even if we lose, even if it means sacrifice, we have to _try_.”

He shook his head. “There are things that I’m not willing to give up anymore, kid. Things that the universe just… isn’t worth.”

Peter actually had the audacity to roll his eyes. “What could _possibly_ be worth more than-”

“ _You_ , Peter,” he snapped, chest heaving. The pressure was building, he couldn’t stand it. “ _You’re_ worth more than the universe. Frankly, kid, I don’t _care_ that other people are suffering. I don’t care, because _you’re_ safe. That’s all I need, it’s all I want, it’s all I’ve _ever_ wanted. You, right here, right with me, and safe.” He clenched his hands in his lap. “I won’t give that up. Not for anything.”

_Not even for this._

“Tony,” Peter looked wounded, exposed, _vulnerable_ , “this is more than just us. There are… there are kids growing up without their parents.” He paused, eyes falling to where he was picking at the seams of the couch cushion with trembling fingers. “There are kids that _have_ grown up without their parents,” he added, voice weak.

Tony knew that Peter was making an unspoken reference to May. To her absence. It pierced through him loud and clear, just like it did every time the kid looked into him with mournful eyes. May and Pepper, a pair of ghosts drifting through the halls. Their presence was never forgotten, never faded into the distance.

And for a split second, as Tony heard the implicit _I’ve grown up without my parent_ in the kid’s statement, he felt resentful.

_Am I not your parent?_ He thought, heard cracking, aching, shuddering under the weight. _Who signed those adoption papers even as their world was fraying at every edge? Who pulled an all-nighter helping you put your final college applications together the day before the deadline? Who cheered the loudest at your graduation? Who held you when that MJ girl broke up with you for Stanford? Who wiped your face from vomit in the aftermath of your first frat party?_

He’d spent nearly every single second of the last five years pouring himself into this kid, this child. Somewhere along the lines, Tony’s happiness become intrinsically linked to Peter’s. He needed him. He was the only goddamn reason to keep dragging himself through day after day, to open his eyes in the morning, to take consecutive breaths.

He didn’t have a clue who he was without this, anymore. He didn’t have a single fucking clue.

“I can’t help everybody,” he snapped.

Peter just stared at him, mouth twitching up in a half-smile despite Tony’s obvious frustration. “I mean, it kinda seems like you _can_.”

“Not if I stop.” Part of him wanted Peter to tell him to, to ask him to slam the brakes and wipe it out of him mind. He would, if the kid asked. He’d let the hope die. Hell, he’d smother it himself if that’s what Peter wanted. “I can… I can put a pin in it right now, and stop.”

“Mister Stark,” he perked up at the old moniker, let gravity finally pull their gazes together, “we’re superheroes. Stopping… it just isn’t really in the job description.”

“I’m not sure I want to be a superhero anymore, Pete.”

“That’s not true.” He hated that the kid was right. Hated that he was _always_ right, that he’d somehow acquired Pepper’s skill of pushing right through his boundaries and curling himself up in his chest. “Just because you don’t use the suit anymore doesn’t mean you’re not Iron Man. You’ll _always_ be Iron Man.”

He smiled, wane and sad. “And you’ll always be Spider-Man?”

“Always.” There was a tint of apology in Peter’s voice, an echo of regret. “No matter how much you wish I wasn’t. It’s… it’s in us, now. Even if I could fix my DNA, even if _you_ could destroy all the suits, we’d always come back to it. That’s just who we are.”

“But we can choose not to, kid.” He leaned forward, heart in his throat. He didn’t know what he was clawing for, validation or restraint. “We can choose. I can… I can put this in a lockbox and drop it to the bottom of the lake,” he brushed his fingertips over Peter’s forehead, let them linger until the kid pressed into the touch, “and we can… we can go to bed.”

The kid shook his head, a breathy laugh shaking his shoulders. “Tony, we’ll never be able to rest if we don’t do this. I know that you know that, even if you’re trying to pretend that you don’t.”

He knew that the decision had been made. He knew that Peter was right. Neither of them would ever find any peace, now that Tony had done what he’d done. There was no more dancing around. There was only shoving through.

“Alright,” he breathed, “we’ll… we’ll try, alright? But I’m still running point. It seems like we’re risking more than I’m willing to give, then I reserve every right to pull the plug, y’hear me?”

Peter nodded. His smile was genuine, but there was the usual flicker of sadness underneath it. “Yeah, I hear you.”

“Good.” Even with the heaviness of their choice resting in his gut, he couldn’t help the way Peter’s presence softened him. He gripped the back of the kid’s neck, squeezing to get his full attention. “You drive a hard bargain, Mister Parker. I’ll even let you crow to Cap about your achievement in the morning.”

Peter blinked. “Are we not going tonight?”

“It’s past midnight, Pete. No, we’re not going tonight.” _Please. Just let me have one more night of this. Let me cling to you for a little bit longer._ “We’ll head to the Compound in the morning. For now,” he tugged Peter forward until he was tipping into his chest, then kicked his feet up on the couch for good measure, “I’m thinking it’s a couch night. Thoughts? Comments? Objections?”

The kid laughed, squirming around until he was more comfortably propped against Tony’s chest. He slung an arm around his waist, buried his face into the crook of his neck. This was a position they’d perfect early on, earlier on than Tony would’ve ever imagined, a tangle of limbs and breath and shared grief.

It had taken Tony a long time to realize that they’d only survived through each other.

“You know,” Peter murmured, “five years is a really long time.”

Time was strange. When he’d been single, or dating Pepper, five years had seemed like a heartbeat. Now, though, he understood exactly what Peter meant.

Months held so much more weight when you were watching your child grow up with the weeks.

“Yeah, Pete, it is.”

The kid hummed in response. Even though Tony couldn’t see his face, he knew he was pondering something. Call it a parent’s intuition.

“I… I don’t know how to say this, really.” Peter finally whispered, hesitant, slow. “But… I want May back.”

He hated that the words sent a flash of jealousy through him. Hated himself for resenting the woman who had _actually_ raised Peter. What claim did he have to him, in the end?

“Of course you do.”

“Yeah, duh, but I’m… I’m not sad that this happened.” Peter shoved his nose into Tony’s pulse point, as if to emphasize his argument. “I like this. I wasn’t sure I would, at first. I wasn’t sure I’d ever like anything ever again, really, but I do. I… I _love_ this. I love you. I guess, I’m just trying to say that… we got really lucky. A lot of people didn’t, but we did.”

“Yeah, Peter,” he forced out, unconsciously tightening his grip on the kid, cradling him close, “we did.”

Tony was just terrified that they couldn’t get lucky again, that wishing on stars and four-leafed clovers could only get them so far in the scheme of the inevitable.


	3. Like The Love Of A Child

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Thanos, it had felt like he was reliving those insecurities all over again. He hadn’t known why he’d been spared. It hadn’t seemed fair. It certainly hadn’t seemed _random._ Perhaps Tony Stark was destined to be the last one standing.
> 
> Except… he hadn’t been.
> 
> He’d had Peter. Just a child, struggling to process the horrors he’d witnessed, staring up at Tony like he was the only thing left.
> 
> Staring up at Tony because he _had_ been the only thing left.
> 
> He was alive, and Peter was the reason. He knew that, now, knew it somewhere deep down. Knew it in the same way he knew how to breathe, knew how to turn firing synapses into muscle movement. There was no _un_ knowing something like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see, I've scrapped the original plan of 6 chapters for this fic. My original outline severely underestimated how much bullshit I am capable of putting into each section. I am human mistake. I'm going to try to figure out a new outline soon, so I'll probably update the chapter count at some point. Or I'll fail and leave it ambiguous. Who knows?  
> Anyway! Thank you so much for all your reviews and kudos so far. I'm really enjoying this fic, and it's lovely to see that people are enjoying it with me!  
> Not to be spoilery, but I've had a lot of people asking if Tony's going to survive this fic in the comments, and I just wanted to reassure everyone that this is a fix-it, so do not fear. I've got you. All the foreshadowing to death in these chapters exists for a reason, but not the one that seems obvious at first glance. If I do my job well, it'll all make sense soon.

Tony had decided long ago that waking up with Peter in his arms was one of the best sensations in the world.

It gave him a sense of security that always seemed just out of reach after the Snap. Then again, he wasn’t alone. Everyone had struggled with a lingered sense of impermanence as the shockwaves began to settle. Parents clung to their remaining children, the couples who got lucky never wanted to unlace their fingers. What was solid was no longer safe. The Vanished had been solid, up until they hadn’t been. How could you trust that it wouldn’t happen again?

And, sure, Tony had heard the story. Thanos was dead, and the Stones had been reduced to ash. What had happened to Pepper wasn’t going to happen to Peter. He knew that, logically. He _did_.

There was just… a sense of sanctuary that came with being in physical contact with the kid. A sense of control, even if it _was_ only an illusion. He was holding Peter, he could feel his warmth, he could count his breaths. There was no flickering out of existence, there was just this moment. This reality. This child.

This chance.

Usually, he woke up feeling empty. Five years had passed him by, and his bed was still too over-large for just one person. Sometimes, when he was only half-awake, still cocooned in the glaze of a dream, he’d reach out for her.

Then his fingertips would brush cool, empty sheets, and he would remember, and the grief was like feeling everything and nothing in the span of a single heartbeat.

Waking up with Peter never truly eliminated that pain, but it dulled it. Made it bearable, because instead of wallowing in the ways he was emptied, he could revel in the ways that he was still full.

Every time he looked at Peter, he could feel himself brimming with love. It was an admission that had become unavoidable within the first few months they’d spent together, and it was just second nature now. Tony’s life had changed so suddenly into something he’d never expected, something he’d never even been entirely sure he _wanted_ , but he didn’t want to go back.

That was… that was something he was going to have to process. He wanted Pepper. God, he wanted Pepper. But he didn’t want to lose this, either. He felt caught between two separate worlds, one foot firmly planted on either side of the tracks.

He didn’t want to have to choose between the woman he loved and his child. He was eerily sure he already knew who he’d pick, and the shame made nausea roll in his gut.

_No,_ he told himself firmly, shaking his head to clear it, _you won’t have to choose. You’ll get her back, and this can stay. This can all stay. You can have both. For once in your life, you can keep the good things._

He had to believe that. If he didn’t, he’d never find the courage to do what had to be done.

When he looked down, the outline of Peter’s nose was just barely visible. He slid two fingers under the kid’s chin and gently tilted his face upwards, taking a few moments to tuck his hair away from his forehead. Peter didn’t react to the movement, just kept sleeping, eyelids fluttering a little as he dreamed.

“Hi,” he whispered, knowing perfectly well that the kid wouldn’t hear him and not caring in the slightest.

There were a million things he needed to do. Putting the universe back together was, after all, not an easy task. He needed to build the device he’d beat out the rough blueprints for last night, had to have F.R.I.D.A.Y. run at least a dozen more diagnostics. He had to pack a bag for himself and make Peter do the same. There were safety checks that should be done on Peter’s suit and, he supposed, his own. The more he thought about the to-do list, the more he came up with things to add.

But all he wanted to do was suspend time. Just for… just for a little bit longer. A few more heartbeats. Surely, it wouldn’t hurt. He’d just linger in this illusion of calm for just a little while longer.

Then, F.R.I.D.A.Y. had to ruin it.

“Boss,” she said, keeping her volume lowered so as not to disturb Peter, “I’ve taken the liberty of gathering a few more rudimentary specs on the device you conceived last night, but I am unable to continue without your guidance. I’ve sent all the information I’ve gathered to your worktable in the garage.”

Despite how much his soul ached, he forced himself to move. He’d become a pro at that: pushing himself into things he didn’t want to do. For a long time, that was all his life had been.

He did his best not to disturb Peter as he settled him back on the couch, but the kid was a light sleeper, so it didn’t really surprise him when he started to shift. Tony paused, kneeling down and brushing a thumb over Peter’s cheek in greeting. The kid blinked awake slowly, gaze still hazy as he processed Tony’s presence. He grinned before he was even close to conscious, eyes drifting back shut when he realized who was touching him.

“Mm.” The kid’s mouth moved slowly, like he was talking through molasses. “Hey.”

He slipped his hand over Peter’s face, settling with his palm flush against his forehead. “Hey to you, too.”

“Everythin’ okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” He glanced at the clock. “You can go back to sleep if you want. It’s still early.”

It wasn’t, really, but there were things Tony still had to do that would be easier without Peter. Plus, the longer he slept, the longer Tony could pretend that this was just another morning.

He desperately needed that, right now.

“M’kay,” Peter murmured, ever trusting. “Where’re you goin’?”

“Just down to the workshop. I’ll be back in a flash, and we can have some breakfast.”

The kid just hummed in response, already drifting back into whatever dream he’d been curled into.

_Good,_ Tony thought, standing slowly and creeping in the direction of the garage, _whatever it is that you’re making up in that big brain of yours, bud, I promise that it’s better than the bullshit going down outside our window._

_It always is._

\--

He only turned the desk lamp on in the garage.

If he listened hard enough, he could almost hear Pepper’s memory scolding him for straining his eyes, but the gentle glow was comforting, and conservative lighting had become a habit since he started living with Peter. The kid’s enhanced vision made too much stimulus agony, and it had only taken Tony a dusting of overload-induced migraines to rework the entirety of his routine and exchange every single LED in the house. There was something about the frequency that messed with the kid’s brain, and the last thing that either of them wanted was an overload.

That had become his life in the aftermath, he supposed. Dancing around the things Peter needed, losing himself in the choreography. Tony really wasn’t sure who he was, anymore. He certainly wasn’t sure of his identity outside of Peter. Peter _was_ his identity, his meaning, his purpose.

He couldn’t really decide if that terrified or comforted him.

_I shouldn't be alive, unless it was for a reason._

He’d said those words to Pepper, in what seemed like a lifetime ago, sitting in a lab that had been lost to the Malibu sea. After Afghanistan, he’d found himself ruminating on the concept of _destiny_ far more than he’d ever allowed himself to before. It had seemed like a natural progression to him, despite Pepper’s concerns, despite therapists’ gentle reminders of phrases like _trauma_ and _PTSD_ and _survivor’s guilt_. He didn’t know what else they had expected from him, though. Somehow, despite the odds, he had lived. Even more so, he had lived and Yinsen had not. How was he meant to process that? How was a man like him meant to build meaning into a life that had, up until that point, been the metaphorical equivalent of Russian Roulette?

The sole comfort he’d found throughout that entire period of his life had been simple. He’d thrown himself into the knowledge that he’d survived for a _reason_. Not because of an unhappy happenstance, or in a right place, right time situation. That… That wouldn’t do.

Tony survived because the world hadn’t been done with him yet, and that had given him hope.

After Thanos, it had felt like he was reliving those insecurities all over again. He hadn’t known why he’d been spared. It hadn’t seemed fair. It certainly hadn’t seemed _random_. Perhaps Tony Stark was destined to be the last one standing.

Except… he hadn’t been.

He’d had Peter. Just a child, struggling to process the horrors he’d witnessed, staring up at Tony like he was the only thing left.

Staring up at Tony because he _had_ been the only thing left.

He was alive, and Peter was the reason. He knew that, now, knew it somewhere deep down. Knew it in the same way he knew how to breathe, knew how to turn firing synapses into muscle movement. There was no _un_ knowing something like that.

He’d brought it up to Rhodey, in the beginning, when he’d just started to realize the magnitude of the knowledge and had been terrified by it. The ways he loved Peter were impossible to explain, and even more impossible to wholly comprehend, but Rhodey had just smiled like he’d understood something sacred, something Tony had already seen but was too frightened to accept.

_“He’s your child, Tones,” the man had said, like it was simple. “That’s what parents feel for their children.”_

He’d known he was right, of course. He’d known that the pang in his chest screamed _parental_ from the beginning, but hearing it said was the final seal.

At least he could carry that with him, through whatever the hell would come in the next few days. He was more than Tony Stark now, more than even Iron Man.

He was Peter’s parent. And, really, that was the best thing he’d ever gotten the chance to be.

He shook the thoughts away, marveling at how easily he found himself distracted nowadays, and got to work.

The Time Travel GPS was easy to slap together, really. It took him less than an hour, and a decent portion of that was spent on trying to make it look cool. In the end, he modeled it a little after Captain Jack’s time travel device in that Torchwood show Peter liked, mostly because he thought it’d make the kid smile.

What was the point of any of it if Peter wasn’t smiling?

He sat back once the device was complete, stretching his arms and letting his eyes drift around the room. His old Iron Man helmet, the one that’d been half-destroyed on Titan, was perched on a dusty shelf, untouched since he’d tossed it there during the move-in. There had been a few moments where he’d seriously considered destroying it, but he’d never been able to do it. Its databases still held that final recording for Pepper, the one he’d done when he thought he and Peter would both die on the Milano, a million miles from home and hope, and even though he could transfer it, there was an emotional need to keep it around.

It was a relic, really, a vestige of a time when Tony was still swimming in the ignorant belief that nothing, not even the very Stones that had powered the universe, could topple Pepper Potts.

Now, he pushed up from his seat and pulled the war-torn metal into his hands, setting it carefully on the worktable. He hovered in front of it for a while, unsure. He’d been thinking of leaving a new goodbye all morning. Just… Just in case. And if that message belonged anywhere, it was here. Two twin diaries, two mirror apologies.

He triggered the helmet’s recording function with a shaky hand. The blue light of the hologram capture swept over him as he stepped away and straddled his chair, tapping an erratic rhythm on the arm as his mind whirred.

“Hey,” he whispered, voice rough as he clawed for the right thing to say, the right way to phrase his final breaths, “this is, well, this is a little awkward, really, and very out of my comfort zone, despite my earlier practice, but… I thought I should record this little greeting, in the case of an untimely death, on my part, of course.” He snickered a little, relaxing as he spoke. “Not that, uh, not that death is ever really untimely, huh? That’s something I’ve learned, this past decade. I’ve learned… I’ve learned a lot of things, actually. I’ve gotta be a changed man at least three times over now, right?”

He _had_ learned a lot, too. More interestingly, he’d learned a lot of things that he’d never even expected to learn. He’d learned how to fall in love, how to accept the concept of his own mortality. He’d learned that aliens were real, had conversed with gods and kings and talking raccoons. He’d learned betrayal on a scale that he was still struggling to cope with.

He’d learned what it was like to earn the love of a child. Even more surprisingly, he’d learned how it felt to love a child in return.

He swallowed, hard, and tried not to think about that child watching this recording.

_Please,_ he thought, forcing himself to refocus on the helmet, hauling himself back to the present, _please, let me live so that I can watch_ him _live._

“I mean, everybody wants a happy ending, right?” He wanted one. He’d always wanted one, really, even if he’d been too arrogant to admit it. “But it doesn't always roll that way.” He glanced down, hope pooling in his chest. “Maybe… Maybe this time.” He pushed the shakiness from his voice. “I'm hoping if you play this back, it's in celebration. I hope families are reunited. I hope we get it all back, and that something like a… like a normal version of the planet has been restored, if there ever was such a thing. God, what a world. Universe, now.”

He wanted to say that he saw it whenever he looked into Peter’s eyes, saw the vastness of everything reflected back at him, but it was such a cheesy thought that it made bile rise in his throat, even if it _was_ true.

He didn’t think that he really needed to say it, either. He knew that Peter knew.

“If you told me ten years ago that we weren't alone, let alone, you know, to this extent, I mean, I-I-I wouldn't have been surprised, but _come on_ , you know? The epic forces of darkness and light that have come into play.” He smiled a little. He couldn’t decide if it was bitter or genuine. Maybe a little bit of both. “And, for better or worse, that's the reality that you’re all gonna have to find a way to survive in.” He sighed, mind drifting back to the ever-present terror in his gut. “This time travel thing that we're gonna try and pull off tomorrow, it's, it's got me scratching my head about the… the survivability of all this. Then again, that's the hero gig, isn’t it? Part of the journey is the end.”

He could practically hear Peter’s voice in his head, tinged with laughter and reprimand. _There’s a lot of ways for things to end, Mister Stark. Stop being so melodramatic._

He shook his head, then pushed himself to his feet. “What am I tripping out over? Everything's gonna work out exactly the way it’s supposed to.” He leaned down to shut the recording off, then paused, finger resting lightly on the button. “Hey, Pete?” He smiled, let himself sink into the softness he felt whenever he thought about the kid. “I love you more than everything.”

\--

Peter was just sitting up when he wandered back into the living room.

“Hey, squirt.” He sat on the coffee table, watching the kid rub blearily at his eyes. “We awake this time?”

“Was I awake before?” Peter asked, shifting to that their knees bumped together.

“Kind of.”

The kid’s face creased as he worked through his memories. “Oh, wait, yeah. Garage?”

Sometimes, Tony marveled at how young Peter still looked. He couldn’t tell if it was abnormal, if Peter just happened to have a youthful face, or if all parents still saw the childhood behind the expressions of adulthood, but it was still there. He didn’t look 21. Didn’t look old enough to drink, to drive, to move out, to live his own life.

“Yep,” he said. “Don’t worry, it was very boring. You didn’t miss much.”

“What’d you do?”

“Made this.” He held up the GPS. “Like it?”

Peter’s face lit up, and _there_ was the smile, wide and bright and the centerpoint of the universe, at least as far as Tony was concerned. “Like Captain Jack’s vortex manipulator!”

Right. Yeah. The _vortex manipulator_. God, he was such a nerd.

“You got it, Pete.” He patted the kid’s knee, then stood. “So, breakfast? Then we can go put an end to Cap’s ridiculous experiments.”

He glanced back to check that Peter was following him into the kitchen, then heard the telltale squeak of the kid hopping up onto his favorite barstool. He’d been meaning to take some WD-40 to it for months, but he never seemed to find the time.

“What experiments?”

He snorted, pulling out a carton of eggs from the fridge. “I’m almost certain they went straight from here to Bruce Banner, who would’ve agreed to help because he’s Bruce, and now they’re jumping in headfirst because that’s the only way Steve knows how to operate.”

Peter’s head tilted to the side. “I thought Steve was the cautious one.”

“That’s what the government wants you to think.”

The kid giggled at that. “It’s kind of fitting, actually. Historically speaking, America isn’t too good at thinking before it jumps, either.”

“Well, that’s a point if I’ve ever heard one.” He shoved a frying pan over the burner. “Now, d’you want your eggs sunny-side-up or scrambled?”

\--

Peter liked it when he drove fast.

That was one of the reasons he decided to drift the Audi around the Compound’s winding driveway. The other, of course, was that he could see Steve Rogers brooding just outside the main entrance, and the need to irk him always overcame any sense of maturity he may have gained over the years.

He misjudged his braking speed, though, much to Peter’s amusement, and had to back up a few feet before he could lower his window and stare up at Steve’s vaguely irritated expression.

“Why the long face?” He quipped. There was something nice about this, about the power that their situation gave him. For the first time in a long time, Steve _needed_ him. “Let me guess,” he forced back his amusement in favor of an air of arrogance, “he turned into a baby.”

Steve glanced away briefly, barely even shocked by Tony’s statement. “Among other things, yeah. What’re you doing here?”

He pushed open his door, caught a glimpse of Peter scrambling to do the same in the passenger’s seat. “It’s the EPR paradox.” He bit back a groan as his back protested him straightening. Getting old sucked and he definitely didn’t recommend it. “Instead of pushing Lang through time, you might’ve wound up pushing time through Lang.”

Peter appeared at his side, eyes flickering between the two men with a mixture of excitement and concern. “It’s really tricky. And, uh, and kinda dangerous, actually. You should be really careful.”

“Kid’s right.” He brushed his shoulder against Peter’s, taking comfort in the kid’s proximity. “Someone should’ve cautioned you against it.”

“You did,” Steve said, voice grave.

And, wow, Tony had not expected that. Was that _remorse_ on Steve Roger’s face? A hint of genuine respect?

_Well I’ll be damned._

“Oh, did I?” He bit back a grin. God, yeah, he was loving this. “Well, thank god I’m here. Regardless,” he held up his wrist, the device he’d slapped together that morning strapped around his hand, “I fixed it. A fully functioning time space GPS.”

Steve’s lips quirked up in a smile. An honest one, too. Not bitter, not unkind. Just open and gentle.

Tony hated that the expression made his chest ache.

“I just want peace.” He said, making the stupid symbol just to have something to do with his hands.

He wandered around to the back of the car, popping the trunk, and paused for a beat. Forgiveness had never been something instinctual, for him. He’d never had a good model of it growing up, either. Howard held grudges, chose revenge over amiability nearly every time. To Tony, forgiveness bit into his pride like a hammer swing. There was no way to do it without admitting a level of fault, and there was nothing Tony hated more than admitting that he had been wrong.

And yet… he was tired of hating Steve Rogers. Maybe that was a cowardly thing to admit: that the emotion that drove him to finally mend the fence with Cap hadn’t been respect, or comradery, or even a sense of duty. That instead, it had been pure _exhaustion_.

But, well, fuck it. This entire plan was crazy and they were all probably going to die trying to execute it. He didn’t want him or Steve to go out on bad terms, and, maybe even more so, he wanted to leave people behind to look after Peter. Despite everything, Tony knew, without a shadow of doubt, that Steve Rogers would be really, really good for his kid.

So: forgiveness.

“And,” his gaze danced over Peter briefly before returning to Steve, “as it turns out, resentment is corrosive, and I hate it.”

Steve’s voice was barely a whisper. Tony could see in his eyes that he’d gotten the message, loud and clear. “Me too.”

He let out a rush of breath, cleared his throat before tossing Peter an easy smile. “Hey, kid. Why don’t you go on inside and check in with Bruce?”

The look on Peter’s face told him that he knew exactly what Tony was doing, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he nodded, albeit reluctantly, and disappeared through the large, glass doors.

“I’m surprised you brought him,” Steve offered once he was gone, expression contemplative. “Thought you’d want him as far away from this as possible.”

“If you’re going to start listing reason why I’m a terrible father, then I’m a good few steps ahead of you,” he bit back. “In fact, I just started on alphabetizing it this morning.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Steve said, shaking his head. “It’s good that you let him come. This is his fight, too. I’m glad you can see that.”

Tony swallowed down a sudden swell of emotion, shifting on his feet, a bundle of frenetic energy. “We’ve got a shot at getting these stones, but I gotta tell you, my priority is to… to bring back what we lost? I hope, yes. Keep what I’ve found? I have to. At all costs.” He stepped forward, placing himself as close to Steve as he’d been since the immediate aftermath, since that haze of horrible realization and grief and loss. “And maybe not die trying. That would be nice.”

For a few seconds, Tony didn’t have a single clue what Steve was going to say in response.

Then, he held out a hand. When Tony clasped it, he gave him a little nod.

“Sounds like a deal.”

\--

He gave Steve the shield back. It had been wrong to take it in the first place. He could see that, now.

If this whole scheme was about righting the universe, then he guessed that the balance ought to at least start on the home front, too.

\--

The Compound was eerily empty.

Bruce and Rocket had gone off to retrieve Thor. Natasha was on Clint’s trail. Everyone else seemed to have melted into the corners, leaving Tony, Peter, a wide-open room, and a time machine to build.

Time always blurred when Tony got his hands on a problem. There was a reason that both J.A.R.V.I.S. and F.R.I.D.A.Y. had been programmed to remind him to eat and sleep. He needed those nudges, else he’d tumble into his own mind and never navigate his way out.

Pepper had been one of his anchors, too, but he tried not to think about that, most of the time.

With Peter at his side, it was a little easier to stay in touch with reality. He was never off duty when it came to the kid. There were no sick days, no compensations for overtime. He assumed that that was why parenthood was so repulsive to people like Howard Stark. It was a 24/7 job. Tony didn’t get breaks, didn’t get to tap out when he got overwhelmed. It didn’t matter how he felt, or what may be going on in his own head. Peter still needed him, still depended on him.

And, yeah, okay, the kid was 21 now. Even five years ago, he’d been 16. He’d never had responsibility for Peter during the rough years, through infancy and childhood, but the principle stuck. Just because the kid didn’t need his attention to survive didn’t mean that he didn’t need it to thrive. And, when it came to creation, he knew that Peter had a propensity to fall into the same toxic patterns that Tony did.

That’s why, at the 24 hour mark, Tony gently asked Peter to go to sleep. _Asked_ was the keyword, too. Peter didn’t respond well to direct orders. Tony had tried that, in the beginning. It was the only concept of parenting that he had ever known. Of course, it hadn’t worked for _him_ , but he’d seen Peter as such a sweet, easy-tempered kid that he couldn’t really imagine him pushing back.

Needless to say, he’d learned his lesson quickly.

Convincing Peter to complete a task was a dance of well-intentioned manipulation. The kid would only do something if he thought it was his idea in the first place. Hence, Tony had to make him think that everything was decided entirely of his own accord.

There were moments when it made him want to tear his hair out.

Peter had, of course, brushed off his initial offer of sleep. Tony had been expecting that, so he’d just let it go and gone back to his own work.

He knew that convincing Peter to go to one of the guest rooms for a nap would be a non-starter. It was too much of a removal, and there was nothing the kid hated more than feeling left out. That meant that he would have to get him to sleep somewhere on the floor, where he could stay amongst the comforting sounds of metal and wiring and the fastening of bolts.

But first, he had to get the kid tired. Or, rather, he had to get him to recognize that he was _already_ tired.

“Hey, FRI?” He pulled a screwdriver out from between his teeth. “D’you mind dimming the room? All these bright lights are giving me a damn headache.”

“They _are_ bright,” Peter agreed, still focused on what it was he was doing. “Like spotlights.”

“Mm,” he responded, pleased that the request seemed to have slid under the kid’s radar. “Put on some music, too. What about, uh,” he feigned thought, as if he hadn’t had his choice primed and ready from the beginning of this plan, “hey, Pete? What’s that new album you like? By that dude who only sings sad songs?”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Peter said, voice half-occupied and half-amused. “MJ says my music taste is restricted solely to _sad white boy with an acoustic guitar_.”

He snickered. “He sang that one song. You know, the really sad one.”

“You’re doing a great job, Tony. Really killing the game with this level of specificity-”

“Let It Go, maybe?”

“Are you referring to Elsa?”

“ _No_.” Warmth blossomed through him, love washing up his spine. “The other one.”

“Are you referring to Passenger?”

_Duh, kid. Jesus. Catch on sooner next time, won’t you?_

He snapped his fingers, as if Peter had just given him an epiphany. “Yes! That’s the one! F.R.I.D.A.Y., play Passenger’s new album.”

“Of course, Boss.”

The first few chords fell out from the loudspeakers, soft and lulling. The difference between his and Peter’s music tastes was the difference between night and day, but he’d found himself surprised by how much the kid’s acoustic playlists had grown on him over the years.

It also helped that this genre of music was a much better lullaby than Tony’s hard rock.

A few minutes later, and Tony heard Peter let out a lazy yawn. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the kid set his tool aside in favor of rubbing at his eyes.

“Tired?” He asked, forcing himself not to glance up from where he was carefully organizing the wiring in one of the machine’s panels.

“A little,” Peter admitted, and that was practically a homerun.

Now was the moment where it got tricky, though. He had to choose his words carefully, coax the kid into the right choice without him noticing the guiderails.

“Hm,” he hummed. “Well, there’s some blankets in that box,” he nodded towards the plastic bin Steve had brought, knowing that the likelihood of Tony sleeping before the project was complete was about zero, “in case you wanna work on the floor for a bit. You can bring that circuit board, poke around, take a breather.”

There was a pause. Tony forced himself not to hold his breath in anticipation, knowing that Peter’s enhanced hearing would pick up on the change in his breathing pattern.

The kid sounded tentative. “You’re okay here?”

_Success_. “Yup.”

“Alright.” There was a minute of two of shifting, as Peter grabbed everything he needed and made a nest of blankets on the floor, just out of the way. “Wake me up if I fall asleep, okay?”

It was cute that Peter asked that, really. They both knew that Tony would agree, and they both knew that it would be a complete lie.

“Sure,” he said, conforming to their usual script. “Let me know when you’ve got that thing ready.”

“Sure,” Peter parroted back.

The kid was asleep within ten minutes.

Tony had just nipped over to cover him with a blanket, slipping the incomplete circuit board out from between his limp fingers, when he heard the doors open and a single set of footsteps marched his way,

A quick glance revealed the intruder to be Steve, which was about what he had been expecting. He offered him a quick nod, the barest of acknowledgments, before moving back to his work silently.

Steve stopped a few feet away. “Tony-”

He cut him off mid greeting. “Wake him up and I’ll snap your neck,” he hissed, tossing a glance back to make sure Peter was still sleeping soundly. “Took me long enough to get him to conk out. Kid’s all-out when he’s got a project.”

There was a glimmer of amusement in Steve’s eyes, but his voice fell into a much quieter volume. “Not at all like his father, then.”

“I’m not his father.”

It… wasn’t a lie, either. _Father_ wasn’t a word that really encompassed everything he felt for Peter. After all, he really _wasn’t_ the kid’s dad. He’d already had one of those, and Tony wasn’t trying to replace anyone. But he… he was _something_. At times, he found himself more than a little frustrated with the lack of word for his role in the kid’s life.

“No?” Steve quirked up an eyebrow, visibly amused. “So what are you, then?”

“I’m his… parent.”

That was, in the end, the closest word he’d found. _Parent_. _Father_ had connotations that neither he nor Peter were comfortable with, and, if Tony knew anything, he knew that a father didn’t have to care. A father gave DNA, but a parent loved, nurtured, raised. Howard Stark had been his father, but he had never been his parent.

Meanwhile, _mentor_ was too detached, too impersonal. It was more of a working relationship, a pairing by convenience rather than choice. He was, at times, Peter’s mentor, but that word just didn’t capture the feeling of waking up at 6:00 am to make the kid a pancake breakfast before school, or bickering over curtain styles in a run-down Ikea, or the desperate need to protect him at any cost.

They’d gone with _guardian_ for a long time, but even that had eventually seemed too temporary. Guardians were stepping stones, provisional solutions between childhood and adulthood. They weren’t meant to last, and the word certainly didn’t hold the same depth, the same connection, that Tony felt whenever he looked into Peter’s eyes.

_Parent_ was permanent, firm. It implied a lifelong commitment. More than a mentor, more than a guardian. Yet not… not biological. Not _father_.

Steve, however, didn’t seem to get the distinction. “That’s the same thing, Tony.”

He just shook his head. He hadn’t really expected Steve to understand, anyway. Maybe this was one of those languages that only he and Peter spoke.

“It really isn’t,” he whispered.

Steve shrugged, let it drop. “Alright. Well, I just… came to check in. See how things were going.” He paused. “I’m still surprised that you came. You seemed pretty adamant at the cabin.”

“Yeah, well,” his hands stalled over his work for a split second, the memory of Pepper’s face catching him off-kilter, “I had… a few nudges in the right direction.”

Steve gestured stiffly in Peter’s direction, a silent question.

He nodded. “Some of them, yeah.” Without thinking, he went to chuck one of his tools aside, then stopped, reminding himself that Peter was sleeping just a few feet away. “Kid’s aunt got Snapped.”

“I remember,” Steve said, because of course he did. Steve was like that: remembered everything, every little detail about every single person. “What’ll you do when she’s back?”

_When_. Not _if_ , but _when_. Steve was so certain that this would work that he was already banking the future on it.

He pushed away the bad feeling in his gut. “What do you mean?”

Apparently, Steve hadn’t expected him to play dumb. “Well, I mean,” he floundered, eyes flickering between Peter and the floor, “things will be… different.”

Steve was right, of course. Things _would_ be different, if this whole plan actually managed to succeed. There was more than just May to consider, too. Pepper would be thrust into a very different world, with a very different Tony. On top of that, he and Peter had grown to used to being on their own. It would be… delicate, to say the least.

He wondered what May would think of the person Peter had become. He wondered if she would approve of the way Tony had polished him off.

Even more, he worried that Peter wouldn’t want him, once this was done. He didn’t know if he could bear to step back from the kid’s life, even if that _was_ what Peter wanted. He… He _needed_ Peter, needed him in a way that he’d promised himself never to need another person again.

Still, he knew that whatever Peter wanted, he would get. Even if it broke Tony to the core.

That was, he thought, the true burden of loving a child. Their needs and wants would forever come before your own.

“I’ll just…” He turned around, faced Peter. “I’ll… well, I’ll adapt to whatever it is he needs.”

_Just like I always do._

Steve seemed to chew through something over the next few seconds. Then, his mouth twitched in the ghost of a smile.

“You’ve changed.”

Tony scoffed, pushing aside the lump of emotion that had lodged in his throat. “Did you know that you sound exactly like the majority of my ex-girlfriends?”

“Very funny, Tony.” Despite the snap in the joke, Steve didn’t rise to the bait. “But it’s true. You’re different, now. It’s a good look on you.”

“What is?”

Steve shifted, looking at him like the elaboration was unnecessary. “Being happy.”

He flinched back, surprised by how much the words landed like an accusation. Because… because he _shouldn’t_ be happy. His fiancé was _dead_. The only woman who had ever truly loved him, certainly the only person that he could imagine spending his life with, at least in that capacity, was nothing but ash and echoes. He’d wanted to have children with her, had wanted to breathe every last breath at her side. And now she was gone, and… and Tony was _happy_. At times, he wondered if he’d ever truly been this happy before, and it _sucked_. It sucked that he could never truly embrace it, not without _her_. It sucked that he’d spent five years tripping over his own guilt.

In a way, it sucked that he had managed to even find happiness in the first place.

“It’s alright, you know,” Steve continued, as if he could read Tony’s thoughts, “to be happy. It’s what she’d want for you.”

“How do you know anything about what she’d want?”

“She loved you, Tony.” The soldier stepped back, half turning to leave, then stalling. “And she’ll love you again, Peter included.”

\--

When Clint came in, he looked like shit.

There were dark bags under his eyes, a sallowness to his skin. But, even worse, there was a whirlpool of darkness that seemed to swallow up everything that made him recognizable. He was one of the walking dead, one of the ones who had never found their way back, after everything they loved was gone.

Clint walked right up to him, mouth set in a way that made Tony’s own jaw ache in sympathy. “Stark.”

He inclined his head, blindsided by the amount of pity that he was suddenly feeling for the shell standing in front of him. “Clint.”

Slowly, the archer’s gaze slid from his face to a point over his shoulder, eyes narrowing. “This your Peter?”

Tony froze. He’d forgotten, for just the briefest of moments, that Peter was standing right behind him. Without really thinking, he braced an arm out in front of the kid’s chest. It… It wasn’t really like he expected Clint to lash out. Despite the briefing Steve had given him, he still trusted that the man he knew was intact underneath all the grief. No, the move was more an instinct than a conscious choice. Clint was looking at Peter like he was doing a hypothetical dissection, and it triggered something visceral in Tony’s gut.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Clint, Peter. Peter, this is Clint.”

Peter offered Clint a shy smile. Tony had kept him out of the graphic briefing on the archer, but Tony had fed him enough for the kid to know the broad brushstrokes of the man’s fall. “It’s nice to meet you, Sir.”

“Yeah,” Clint’s eyes were still drinking Peter in. “How old are you, Peter?”

The kid seemed a little blindsided by the question. “I’m, uh, I’m 21, Sir.”

“Funny,” the man mused, voice quiet, “you seem so much younger.”

“Do I?” Peter’s voice was high and tight with nerves. “I mean, uh, people… people say that, sometimes. That I look younger than I actually am.”

Clint hummed in response, gaze finally pulling from Peter to Tony. There was steel in his eyes, and something sharp in his words. “Bit cruel, don’t you think, that I lost my kids and you managed to pull one out of thin air?”

Tony stiffened. It felt like the whole room froze. Nobody breathed, nobody moved.

“Clint,” Natasha muttered, taking a step forward, hands clenched. “Don’t say anything you’ll regret.”

He waved her off, laughing bitterly. “What’s everybody looking at me like that for? I’m not gonna hurt Stark’s precious kid. Just pointing out the facts, is all.”

“I’m sorry about your family,” Peter blurted, and now everyone was staring at _him_ , including Clint. “What were their names?”

“ _Peter_ ,” Tony cautioned, trying to pour as much warning into the name as possible. “It may not be a good idea to-”

“Laura,” the man said, cutting Tony off. His voice was quiet, reverent. “That was… That was my wife. My daughter was Lila. My boys were Cooper and Nathanial.”

“I’m gonna try to help you get them back, Sir,” Peter said, gently pushing Tony’s restraining hand away, “whatever… whatever it takes. I swear.”

Tony felt a little guilty that his first thought at hearing the promise was, _I really hope you don’t mean that, kid_.

Clint blinked a little, lips parting as he sucked in a sharp breath. Then, as Peter often managed to trigger with just about everyone he met, his face softened.

“I like him.”

\--

They had one test run.

A single time travel test run, and then they were all strapping in and throwing themselves into one of the stupidest, most dangerous missions Tony had ever been a part of. And that was saying something,

Scott looked about two seconds from pissing his pants, and Tony knew immediately that he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t hold up to the stress. It had to be someone else. Somewhere to his left, Clint was stepping forward, lines of determination on his face, and Tony knew that it couldn’t be him, either.

“Well, I’ve always been a big Back to the Future fan,” he blurted. “I’ll do it.”

Peter’s hands were clenching around his elbow before he’d even processed the consequences of what he’d just said. “What are you doing?” The kid hissed. “You… Tony, this is _dangerous_.”

He wished he had something comforting to say, but he didn’t. Peter was right. This _was_ dangerous.

Which was exactly why he was the one who would do it.

He looked to Steve. He refused to beg, but he did let a little bit of his desperation shine through in his voice. “It has to be me, Cap.”

“Why, Tony?” Rhodey seemed pissed, too. “You’re the one who’s been spewing shit about what you’ve got to lose since you showed up here. Why on _Earth_ would you-”

“ _Because_ I’ve got something to lose.” He kept his eyes locked on Steve’s, not backing down. “I’ve got a reason to come back. I _have_ to come back. I won’t let this mission be anything other than successful.”

_It can’t be. I have to come back to him. I have to._

He saw the moment Steve relented, saw the quirk of his mouth as he knew he’d been beaten.

“Get him in the suit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s little trivia from my real life scattered throughout this chapter, which is something y’all probably know I like to do if you’ve read some of my other stuff. LEDs mess with my brain and my favorite barstool in my parents’ house squeaks really badly. My dad and childhood best friend were talking about me while I was writing this chapter, and they both starting joking about how the only way to convince me to do something was to gently manipulate me into doing it, and I thought that’d be cute to include. Passenger has a new album called Sometimes It’s Something, Sometimes It’s Nothing At All, and that’s been the soundtrack to this whole fic. The fic’s overall title and all of the chapter names were stolen from those lyrics.  
> As always, y'all are the best for reading this. Every update is because of and for you guys, and I love you.
> 
> OH, AND LITTLE NOTE: I chose to have Tony test the time travel for this fic. I have a few reasons for this, but a lot of it is simply to mix things up and not follow Endgame entirely. Plus, I think it'll be more fun for all of us if we get to have that happen, so I went with it. I love Clint desperately, and I think that he was absolutely the right person to do it in the movie, so please don't attack me if he's a fave and you think I'm doing him dirty.


	4. Another Lover Looking Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _This is an alternate timeline now,_ he thought suddenly, blocking out the bickering in favor of feeling his heart hammer with the realization of the opportunity that had just been thrown so unceremoniously into his lap, _I could tell them about Thanos, I could stop all of this before it even began._
> 
> For a few seconds, it was tempting. He bartered the idea back and forth in his head. What would happen if he jumped out of his hiding place, spilled everything he knew? It’d give them a fighting chance, at least. Maybe they could stop it. Maybe they could do what Tony had been too weak to manage.
> 
> But then reality crashed down on him like a tub of freezing ice. If he changed that final fight with Thanos, what else would he change? If this Tony didn’t create Ultron, then Vision would never exist, either. The team would never meet Wanda. And what about all the other threats that stood between these Avengers and the eventual Decimation? If Tony intervened, would Steve ever find out about Barnes? Would they discover that Hydra had infiltrated SHIELD? Would they go to confront Thanos now, blind and hastily informed and entirely unprepared?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been working on this chapter so for long that I thought my brain might start leaking out of my ears if I didn't quit editing and just post it already, so I apologize for any mistakes! Updates have been slow to all my fics because I've been on vacation, but I'm glad to have this one finally up!  
> Little note: the time travel in Endgame is confusing, and it makes 0 sense when I start to really ponder it. I'm going to try my best to uncomplicate it throughout this fic, but at the end of the day, it's pretty unsalvageable. Just remember that as we continue.

At the end of the day, Tony had become pretty numb to the concept of his own mortality.

It wasn’t necessarily that he was blind to it. He was, in fact, very cognizant of how frighteningly fragile he was in the scheme of things. If his time as an Avenger had taught him anything, it was that human life was easily crushed in the grip of the universe.

He’d heard people say that death became easier to face with age. Maybe it did, and Tony was just slipping through the decades, following the natural order of things. Maybe that was why mortality seemed to scare Peter in ways that nothing else did: because he was young. Because biology and evolution were kicking into overdrive, pushing the next generation to fight tooth-and-nail for another sunrise.

As he walked towards the platform, the _time travel_ platform, the thing that was literally going to spit him into the quantum realm with nothing but a device he’d slapped together in a single morning to tether him back to reality, he could practically feel the fear leaking out of the kid. He was glued to his side to the point that their ankles would occasionally bump to together on juxtaposed steps, as if the proximity could stay the inevitable.

It killed him that he was the reason Peter was so on edge, but the guilt wasn’t enough to make him step back and reconsider. He’d meant what he’d said to Steve: it had to be him. Out of all of them, he had somehow come through the last five years with at least some semblance of stability, something precious to hold onto. The rest of them were just… floating. Reaching out for tethers in a world that had been set adrift.

He let Peter cling close once they came to a stop on the platform, turning to give him a calming look as Bruce ran some last-minute diagnostics on the suit. Usually, he could soothe the kid with relatively little effort, but even he acknowledged that they were beyond that, now. This was more than a nightmare, this was reality. This was Tony, putting himself directly in harm’s way, positioning Peter over the title of _orphan_ all over again.

He knew that he was shoving him into one of his greatest fears. He knew that it wasn’t fair. He knew that it went against everything he meant to do. Parents weren’t built to abandon their kids, and yet here he was.

There was a part of him that would forever carry this guilt.

“Now Tony,” Bruce said, and he was peripherally aware of Nebula messing with something on a hologram screen behind him, “you're gonna feel a little discombobulated from the chronoshift. Don't worry about it.”

“Wait, wait, wait a second.” Rhodey strode forward, setting a light hand on Peter’s shoulder. Tony could see the concern in his face, too, the desperation to pull Tony back from the abyss. “Let me ask you something. If we can do this, you know, go back in time,” he said it like he couldn’t believe it, which, to be fair, even Tony was struggling with at this point, “why don’t we just find baby Thanos, you know, and…”

Tony had to hold back a snort when Rhodey mimed strangling someone with a wire. The horror that fell across everyone’s faces only furthered his amusement. He forgot, sometimes, that he was the only one in the room to have known Rhodey before he became a Colonel, to have known him even before he joined the _army_. To the rest of the Avengers, the man must look so polished, so morally solid.

And, yeah, Rhodey was all of those things, but he was a hell of a lot more than that, too. He was fiercely loyal, and, despite how hard it could be for Tony to wrap his head around the idea on his worst days, he knew that Rhodey had chosen him all those years ago, back when he’d been tripping over his feet at MIT. Ever since that moment, Tony had become a mission. There was nothing Rhodey wanted more than to keep him alive, to toss him from one day to the next. It had, admittedly, been a rough ride, but the man had never faltered, never given in. And from the look on his face, he had no intention of doing so now, either.

“First of all,” Bruce said, startled, “that’s _horrible_.”

Rhodey rolled his eyes. “It’s _Thanos_.”

“And secondly, time doesn't work that way. Changing the past doesn't change the future.”

Tony nodded, trying his best to be sympathetic. He knew that Rhodey was only suggesting something so off-the-wall because he was scared. He didn’t want Tony to do this, was smart enough to process all the ways this whole endeavor could go horribly, horribly wrong.

“It doesn’t, Rhodey,” he murmured, “it’s more complicated than that-”

Scott, as usual, seemed clueless. “No, no, _look_. We-We go back, we get the Stones before Thanos gets them, and then Thanos doesn't have the Stones. Problem solved.”

“Would that work?” Peter asked, voice small.

Tony shook his head, rubbing his palm up and down the kid’s arm, absentmindedly comforting. “No, buddy. When… When you start messing around with multiple timelines, multiple universes, it isn’t linear in the way we perceive it. It’s… It’s more-”

Rhodey glared, cutting him off with a mercilessness that only a few people on Earth were brave enough to exhibit around him. “But, Tony, Scott has a point. If we remove the Stones before Thanos finds them, then-”

“That’s not how it works,” Nebula snarled.

“Well, that’s what I heard,” Scott shot back.

“What? By who?” Tony imagined that he felt a lot how Bruce sounded. Then again, it wasn’t a new sensation for him. He usually found himself one step ahead of the rest of the world. “Who told you that?”

Rhodey’s sass was palpable, and Tony couldn’t resist a little smirk as he started naming movies on his fingers. “Star Trek, Terminator, TimeCop, Time After Time-”

“Quantum Leap,” Scott added.

“A Wrinkle in Time, Somewhere in Time-”

“Hot Tub Time Machine-”

Tony nearly snorted, but held it in as Rhodey kept going. He was a little grateful, really, because the ridiculousness of the situation was enough to make even Peter giggle, some of the tenseness in his shoulders loosening.

“Hot Tub Time Machine. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,” the Colonel finished. “Basically, any movie that deals with time travel.”

“Die Hard?” Scott tried, then shook his head. “No, that’s not one…”

Rhodey just ignored him, plowing forward as if Scott and Bruce and all their objections and interjections didn’t exist. “This is known.”

“I don't know why everyone believes that, but that isn't true,” Bruce said, sounding about two more comments away from a full-on breakdown. “Think about it. If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future, and your former present becomes the past, which can't now be changed by your new future...”

There was a look of betrayal on Scott’s face. “So Back To The Future's a bunch of bullshit?”

Tony rolled his eyes at the man’s antics. “The point _is_ ,” he stressed, catching Rhodey’s eyes and silently begging him for understanding, for permission, “that the moment we jump back to the past, we’re creating alternate realities. Nothing we do in that reality is going to affect what happens in this one.”

Nebula nodded, sharp and mechanical. “Exactly.”

Rhodey paused for a second, eyes roving across Tony’s face, before shaking his head in exasperation. “You know I hate this, Tones.”

“Don’t worry,” he snorted. “I’m aware.”

Bruce’s voice was gentle, a hint of apology in the inflection. “We should clear the platform.”

“Alright, yeah,” he said, staring directly at Peter, “just… just give us a second, please?”

“Obviously, yes, of course,” Bruce rushed to add, quickly pulling away and waving Nebula down with him, as if she needed the gesture to move.

She really _had_ grown on him, although he hated to admit it, and he didn’t miss the terse nod she shot him as she left, which was as close to a love letter as Nebula got.

Rhodey grabbed his shoulder roughly, jaw tight. “Don’t die, alright?”

He smirked back. “Haven’t you heard? I’m certifiably impossible to kill.”

“You’d better be,” the man responded, eyes darting to Peter before he stepped away.

With Rhodey gone, it was just him and the kid, stranded out on the empty platform. A few feet away, the entire team was hovering around the control panel, pretending to be looking anywhere but them, but he suddenly felt incredibly exposed. It was as if they were on display, hundreds of eyes staring in on a moment where he craved nothing but intimacy.

“Hey, hey, look at me,” Tony murmured, shoving down the discomfort and cupping the curve of Peter’s jaw, tilting his face until their gazes met. The kid’s eyes were glassy with tears, but he didn’t comment on that. He just smiled gently, exuding as much I’m-Tony-Stark-so-I’ve-got-this energy as possible. “Everything’s gonna be just fine.”

“Yeah,” Peter forced out, smile brittle. “Yeah, you’ll be fine.”

“And it’ll be over before you know it. Literally, too, because it’ll only be a couple of seconds for you guys. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Right.”

“Go to Rhodey,” he ordered, then pulled the kid in and pressed a quick kiss to his forehead. “I love you, buddy. I’ll be right back.”

Peter took a few blind steps back, not looking away as he let Rhodey stride forward and tug him towards the ramp and away from Tony. “I love you too.”

He could hear the fear wound tight through Peter’s vocal cords, and it made his own throat constrict painfully. He barely had enough time to ponder it all, however, before Bruce was counting down and the machines were whirring to life around him.

“Alright, Tony, we’re going in 3, 2, 1…”

Right before he got sucked down into the chaos, he made sure to wink in Peter’s direction.

He got a brief glimpse of his kid grinning before everything exploded into color, and that was enough.

\--

He landed in 2014 gasping.

Tony had chosen the location, the time, all on a last-minute whim. There was a part of him that knew he picked it because of nostalgia, that despite how much he didn’t want to admit it, he’d been reaching for the past even as he propelled himself into the future.

He hit the balcony of the Tower hard. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting from time travel, but a harsh landing hadn’t exactly been on his itinerary. Maybe it should’ve been, but it wasn’t.

It took him a few seconds to get his bearings. When Bruce had said _discombobulated from the chronoshift_ , Tony hadn’t really thought he’d meant _felt like his spleen had been pulled out through his nose_.

He staggered to his feet, trying to silence his gasping and flinging his gaze desperately around him, checking to see if anyone had been around to witness his abrupt entrance. Luckily, his calculations of the timeframe must’ve been right, because the balcony was deserted. The sun had set only minutes before, lingering smears of red swirling in with the pinprick light display that was New York’s night-basked skyline.

There wasn’t any reality where the sight of this city didn’t take his breath away.

He slipped towards the Tower’s entrance, still trying to shake off the lingering disorientation from having his atoms literally _shredded_ and reassembled, and slipped his sunglasses on, tapping the side to access the AI inside.

“F.R.I.D.A.Y.?” He whispered, careful to keep his voice low. “Did you and J.A.R.V.I.S. have a chat?”

“We did.”

He rolled his eyes at the vague answer. “And will an alarm go off if I go inside?”

“No, Boss.”

“Thank you,” he said, moving forward.

The interior of the Tower had changed a lot since 2014. For one, a good portion of the main space that he was currently observing had been destroyed during the Ultron fiasco. Then, of course, he’d moved everything out after the Sokovia Accords. He’d wanted to sell the Tower, to strip away what he’d seen as the final baggage that the Avengers had left behind.

Then he’d taken on a more active role in the life of a certain spider-kid, and having a place in New York was suddenly a lot more appealing.

Now, though, it felt like he was staring down a real-time nostalgia trip. The Tower was exactly as he remembered it being, back before everything went so terribly, terribly wrong. Back in his timeline, the space could feel paralyzingly empty, even with Peter’s youth filling up the hallways. But here, it was full of voices.

Which meant that it was full of _people_.

Tony had, of course, been expecting that, so he was prepared to duck behind a counter, peeking around the corner to watch the scene from a distance. Everyone was there, just as he’d remembered them. Thor, Nat, Steve, Clint, Bruce. Tony could even see himself (which, yes, was an incredibly bizarre experience) sitting on the couch, drinking lazily from a glass of whiskey.

Huh. Right. This was long before he’d given up drinking. Long before a lot of things, really.

“C’mon, Stark,” Steve said, using a teasing tone that just didn’t exist between them anymore, not since their relationship had ruptured into side-stepping and dancing around open wounds, “you really can’t expect to spend your whole life as Iron Man.”

“Yeah,” Clint snarked, flinging his legs over Natasha’s lap. “There’s gotta be a family man in there somewhere.”

“Debatable,” the other Tony said, and he couldn’t help but flinch at little at how strange it was to hear his own voice outside of a recording.

Clint pointed at him. Or, Clint pointed at the _other_ him. The not _him_ him. God, this was confusing.

“No, no, no. Don’t _debatable_ me. He’s in there.”

“Well, if I ever find him, I’ll let you know. Or, rather, I’ll let Pepper know. I think she’d be the prudent choice. I’d need her for the logistics.”

“Did you just call knocking your girlfriend up _logistics_?” Clint accused, feigning horror.

“What else would you call it?”

“ _Tony_ -”

_This is an alternate timeline now_ , he thought suddenly, blocking out the bickering in favor of feeling his heart hammer with the realization of the opportunity that had just been thrown so unceremoniously into his lap, _I could tell them about Thanos, I could stop all of this before it even began._

For a few seconds, it was tempting. He bartered the idea back and forth in his head. What would happen if he jumped out of his hiding place, spilled everything he knew? It’d give them a fighting chance, at least. Maybe they could stop it. Maybe they could do what Tony had been too weak to manage.

But then reality crashed down on him like a tub of freezing ice. If he changed that final fight with Thanos, what else would he change? If this Tony didn’t create Ultron, then Vision would never exist, either. The team would never meet Wanda. And what about all the other threats that stood between these Avengers and the eventual Decimation? If Tony intervened, would Steve ever find out about Barnes? Would they discover that Hydra had infiltrated SHIELD? Would they go to confront Thanos now, blind and hastily informed and entirely unprepared?

Maybe they would just end up dying together.

Maybe this Tony would never meet Peter Parker.

And that… that was an unthinkable outcome. Tony _needed_ Peter. In every reality, in every timeline. He couldn’t risk that. There was nothing in the world that was worth risking that.

God, he really, _really_ missed his Peter.

It swept over him in a sudden, knee-crippling wave. If he hadn’t already been crouching, he wasn’t sure he would’ve been able to stay on his feet.

This was 2014. He was staring at a Tony Stark that didn’t have a clue about Peter Parker’s existence. And yet somewhere in this very city, a thirteen-year-old version of his child was going about his life, completely oblivious to the crash-course trajectory they were both on.

Just as he thought that he might implode from the magnitude of those thoughts, J.A.R.V.I.S. announced the elevator, the doors slid open, and he realized that he’d forgotten a piece of this memory, forgotten what was about to happen until it had already tripped into him.

“Tony?”

Every inch of him went cold, because he _knew_ that voice. Knew the way it flowed around his name better than nearly every other sound on Earth.

Pepper Potts strolled out of the elevator like she wasn’t toppling Tony’s composure with every measured step. _Shit,_ she was beautiful. He always used to forget that, even before Thanos. She’d never failed to strike him speechless the moment she entered a room.

Pepper Potts. Pepper Potts. He’d wanted to change her name to Stark, could still remember the bickering about whether or not she’d be willing to part with the last name that had followed her through childhood, through degrees, through becoming one of the most high-powered CEOs in the world. They’d finally started narrowing down on a compromise, Potts-Stark, when that stupid spaceship had carried him so far away from her.

And then another spaceship had brought him home, and she’d been gone.

Past Tony was talking to her, waving a hand flippantly like she wasn’t the most precious thing, like he had time to spare and words to discard. Like this moment shouldn’t be _everything_. God, what Tony would do for another moment like this. He’d kill for it, die for it.

Sense slipped out the window. He could hear everyone’s voices in his head, cautioning him to stay down, stay back. He could hear his own thoughts from earlier, the temptation and the restraint, the perpetual reminder that if he interfered, he might be dooming this timeline to something far worse than the destruction of Thanos.

He might be dooming this Tony to a life without everything that made it worth living.

And yet… he needed Pepper, and there she was. In the five years since their last moments together, he’d forgotten just _how much_ he needed Pepper.

He needed her, and she was _right there_.

His legs moved without thought, but with precise direction. He stumbled upright, Pepper’s name on his lips, but then the device over his palm beeped, and the world tore away.

\--

For a few second of cliff-edge terror, the world was color and color and color, endless and swirling and the kind of kaleidoscope that Tony could imagine getting lost in, getting suspended in until he was nothing more than a speck in the mess. It was dizzying, nauseating, it sent his mind spinning, vison swimming. It was the kind of kaleidoscope that would swallow him whole and never-

He hit the platform on his hands and knees, impact jarring up his arms, reverberating in his shoulders.

Solid. Cold. Firm.

He groaned. It felt like every atom in his body had been pulled apart, examined, reassembled. The relief of being together and stationary wasn’t even enough to eclipse the shakiness in every inch of his limbs.

But then were hands pulling him upright, touching his face, and the voice of the person who eclipsed _everything_.

“Tony? Tony? Look at me.” Peter’s face was suddenly the only thing in his vision, soft eyes wide and scared. “Hey, hey. Are you okay?

“Yeah,” he gasped, letting the kid haul him upright, leaning into him. Maybe that’s all he’d really been doing for the past five years: using Peter as a crutch, healing him so that he didn’t have to heal himself. “Yeah.”

“You’re okay?” Peter asked again, hands gripping desperately at his shoulders. “You’re sure? You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, buddy, I’m fine.” A smile pulled across his face, realization settling in. “It worked,” he whispered to the kid, gently cupping his face. After a few seconds of letting Peter sink into the gaze, tension unknitting, he turned to look at the rest of the team, all gathered anxiously a few feet away.

“It worked.”

\--

“Okay, so the _how_ works,” Steve said, and Tony had to admit that he was the model leader: tall, strong, resolute. He always made Tony feel miniscule, standing next to him. Maybe that was why they’d always jarred each other. Tony Stark wasn’t used to feeling insignificant. Or, maybe, he was a little _too_ used to it. “Now we gotta figure out the _when_ and the _where_. Almost everyone in this room has had an encounter with at least one of the six infinity stones-”

“Or,” Tony jumped in, holding a coffee in one hand and gesturing widely with the other. That had always been his way of coping with Steve: exaggeration. Be bigger, louder, more up-in-your-face, “substitute the word _encounter_ for damn well near been killed by one of the six infinity stones.”

While most of the team looked solid, Scott just blinked around. “I haven’t, and I don't even know what the hell you're all talking about.”

Bruce wandered up to where Steve and Tony were standing. “Regardless, we only have enough Pym Particles for one round trip each, and these stones have been in a lot of different places throughout history.”

Tony’s eyes flickered to Peter. The kid seemed so giddy with the lingering relief that Tony had come through the time travel unscathed that he wasn’t even starry-eyed at being in a room full of Avengers, planning a world-saving mission. He just blinked back with a dopey grin, expression dripping the kind of blind love that threatened to send Tony into a cardiac arrest.

“Our history,” he said, not breaking Peter’s eye contact. “So, not a lot of convenient spots to just drop in, y’know.”

“Which means we have to pick our targets,” Clint added, voice low, gravelly, still ruined with grief.

“Correct.”

“So… let's start with the Aether.” Steve turned to the corner of the room. “Thor, what do you know?”

And so it began.

\--

Trying to map out an accurate timeline of the Stones was, in fact, a lot harder than any of them had really anticipated it would be.

They worked through lunch. Tony made sure that Peter shoveled at least two containers of takeout down his throat as the meeting dragged on. The kid was still clinging to him, seemingly content to spend every possible second pressed up against his side.

Tony didn’t mind. If anything, the proximity calmed the turmoil that he’d been wrestling with since the time travel test pulled the rug out from under his feet.

He hadn’t expected seeing Pepper again to hurt so much. He should’ve, of course, but he truly was an expert in delaying thoughts that might shake his foundations. It was how he had managed to raise Peter with any semblance of competency. If he’d gone to pieces every time the ghosts of his past had tried to resurface, he wouldn’t have had a hope of _living_ , let alone providing for a child.

It felt like they’d been deliberating for hours. Everyone was growing weary. He, Peter, Natasha, and Bruce were all sprawled out across tables and the floor, staring at the ceiling and babbling in the guise of working. At this point, their brains were so fried that bringing up anything useful was starting to seem like a monumental feat.

Peter’s head was resting on his stomach. He could feel the weight of it pressing back with every breath. He was paying more attention to the steady rhythm his hand had taken up through the kid’s hair than the actual conversation, but he was half-tuned in, just in case he got asked a question.

He could just make out Natasha wiggling a pen out of the corner of his eyes, deep in thought. “That Time Stone guy...”

“Doctor Strange,” Bruce provided, sounding just as tired as Tony felt.

“Yeah, what kind of doctor was he?”

_Not a good enough doctor to save the lives of half the universe,_ he thought bitterly.

“Neurostuff meets rabbit from a hat,” he said instead, squeezing the bridge of his nose against the headache he could already feel pumping behind his eyes. His other hand unconsciously smoothed a few curls away from Peter’s temple.

“Nice place in the village, though.”

He snorted. “Yeah. Sullivan Street.”

“Hmm… Bleecker.”

Considering how long it had been since Peter had last spoke, Tony was more than a little surprised when the kid’s voice broke in, cutting off the joke that had been resting on the tip of his tongue.

“Wait, he lived in New York?”

“No, Pete, he lived in Wonderland.”

“Oh, shut up.” There was laughter in Peter’s tone, but then it sobered. “But doesn’t that mean that if you pick the right year, there are three stones in New York?”

A beat of silence. Then, Tony sat up, dropping Peter’s head from his stomach to his lap.

“Holy shit.”

\--

They were all back in the conference room, as whole as a half could be. Steve was standing at the front, by the hologram screens. He was looking out at them like they were soldiers, and it made Tony’s instincts scream to bundle Peter up, pull him away from the violence the universe had promised them.

“Okay, so we’ve got our targets,” Steve’s voice carried across the room, “now it’s time to pair off, figure out who’s going to hit what timeframe. Tony, I assume you’ll want to stick with Peter.”

He had an arm slung around the kid’s shoulders, and he tightened it protectively. “You assume right, Capsicle.”

“And I’m with Clint,” Natasha added, tone firm.

Steve nodded to her. “Understood. Thor, it makes the most sense that you get the Aether. You’re the only one here who knows Asgard well enough to get in and out unseen and uninhibited. Rocket, can you go with him?”

“Sure,” the raccoon said, and man, the whole talking Build-A-Bear thing was still a little disconcerting, “nothing I love more than babysitting.”

Steve ignored the jab. Then again, he’d been dealing with Tony for over a decade. He was probably immune to sarcasm by now.

“Nebula, you’re the one who has the location of the Power Stone, and space is far more your rodeo than ours. And Rhodey, I want you to go with her.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Tony couldn’t help the little thrill of nervousness at the idea of his best friend being shoved into space with only a borderline-sadistic android for company. He liked Nebula, sure, but he didn’t like her _that_ much. Not enough to trust her with some of the only family he had left. “Why Rhodey?”

Steve took the question in stride, because of course he did. “He knows how to stay calm under pressure, and I need the rest of you in other places.”

“Then where are the kid and I going to go?”

“Clint, Natasha, Scott, Bruce, and I will go to New York to get the Mind, Time, and Space Stones. You and Peter are going to go to Vormir, to get the Soul Stone.”

His heart clenched. The last thing he wanted was to take Peter to yet another alien planet. He’d nearly lost him the first time and he knew, behind all the walls he’d built to keep the knowledge from crushing him, that if Thanos’ lottery had swung another way, he might’ve.

But before he could open his mouth to protest the assignment, Nebula did it for him.

“Don’t send them.”

Steve narrowed his eyes, turning to stare blatantly at Nebula’s face, which stayed impassive. “And why not, exactly? It makes sense. Tony and Peter have experience in space, as well as in piloting a spaceship. They won’t be flying quite as blind as the rest of us would be.”

Adrenaline swooped through his stomach. For some reason, he had a horrible feeling about going to Vormir. Like if they went through with this plan, something terrible would happen.

He swallowed, tried his best to keep his voice level. “Yeah, and the last time we flew a spaceship, we _crashed it_ , Steve.”

“You won’t this time.”

“Listen to me,” Nebula snarled, voice metallic and cold. Sometimes, she seemed human, but not now. Now she was all machine, “you _cannot_ send Stark and his child to Vormir.”

“Give me a reason.”

Nebula’s resistance only fueled his own, as if her doubt had given purchase to the paranoia burning a hole in his stomach. “Damn it, Steve, _I’ll_ give you a reason. Both the Time Stone and the Mind Stone are in _my_ Tower. I know the layout and, if J.A.R.V.I.S. and his security systems come back online while you’re poking around in there, I’m the only thing that’ll be able to stop him from setting off an alarm and blowing the whole deal.” He swallowed, meeting Cap’s gaze head-on, inviting a challenge. “It makes more sense for us to be in New York.”

“I agree with Stark,” Natasha said, drawing everyone’s attention. “Clint and I can go to Vormir. Keep him and the kid on solid ground.” She smirked. “Something tells me that they’ve had their fill of space.”

_Thank you,_ he mouthed.

She inclined her head in his direction, understanding in her eyes, and it made Tony wonder why he’d always considered her to be cold.

“Alright.” Steve slapped the table, nodding as he rearranged the plan in his head. “Alright. We’ve got our teams, now we’ve just gotta execute.” He gestured around the room, dismissive. “Well, go on. Get out of here, get some sleep. We meet here early in the morning. Don’t be late.”

_Yeah, sleep well, everyone,_ Tony thought, a wry smile pulling at his lips, _tomorrow, we’re either gonna save the world or die trying._

\--

When Tony came out of the bathroom that night, Peter was sitting on his bed, practically swimming in pajama pants and an oversized sweatshirt, damp hair hanging down in his face.

He wasn’t surprised by the kid’s presence, despite neither of them agreeing to meet in his room. For one, he was used to Peter seeking him out in moments of high stress, and there was nothing about tomorrow that could be categorized as relaxing. But, apart from that, Tony had developed a weird knack for sensing Peter’s presence before he saw him. The kid jokingly called it his _parent radar_ , and Tony had to admit that it wasn’t a half-bad description.

It wasn’t anything magical, of course. Tony just… knew. He could gauge if the kid was silently suffering without even looking in his direction, knew where he was in the house without having to check. It was a little funny, really, in the moments when Peter had thought he’d done a stellar job of holing himself away with his misery, only to have Tony zero right in on his location without even trying.

“Hey,” Peter murmured, curling his knees to his chest. “You took a long time.”

He rolled his eyes, rubbing his towel over his hair one last time before tossing it carelessly into a corner of the room. “Sorry. Didn’t realize I had a spider-kid waiting on me.”

“Did you think that I _wouldn’t_ be waiting for you?”

“Fair point.” He crawled up onto the mattress and settled next to Peter, smiling a little as he brushed a few damp curls away from the kid’s temple. “You alright? Today was a lot.”

“Yeah.” Peter bit his lip, eyes shining with delayed emotion. “You scared me, y’know.”

“I know.”

“Why’d you do it, then?”

The words were an accusation, but Peter’s tone was anything but. It sounded like defeat. It sounded like the plea of a kid who was getting a little too used to being the one left behind.

“I had to.”

Peter seemed to search his face for something, gaze bouncing between both of his eyes as if, eventually, one would reveal whatever it was he was looking for.

“You’re all I have left, you know,” the kid finally muttered, admission a little wobbly. “Without you, I don’t really have anything.”

“Peter…”

“And you’re wrong. You didn’t _have_ to do that,” Peter said, plowing forward. “You don’t have to do anything. You… You didn’t have to be the one who tested the time travel, just like you didn’t have to be there for me, after… after everything.”

“I _wanted_ to be there for you, Pete-”

“I know, but you didn’t _have_ to. You didn’t have to be anything to me, but you… you _are_ , now, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. Nothing’s worth that.”

He leaned closer to the kid, a wry smile pulling at his lips. He knew that his next words were cruel, but they came out anyway. “Even May?”

Peter’s face twisted up, and his tone was sharp with the kind of reprimand that Tony could only really stomach from his child. “No, that’s not fair. You don’t get to make me choose.”

“What if you have to choose?” He swallowed. “What if you _didn’t_ have a choice?”

The kid balked at that, as if it wasn’t something he’d considered before that moment, as if Tony’s worries weren’t as universal as he’d thought they were.

“I wouldn’t,” Peter said, and Tony was almost jealous of how certain he sounded.

“Peter…”

The kid glared, and then, in a movement entirely juxtaposed with the expression, reached out and pulled himself into Tony’s chest, laying his cheek against his shoulder and whispering another “I _wouldn’t_ ,” against his shirt.

Tony softened, guilt rising as the unfairness of his question finally settled over him. He wrapped Peter up against him, sighing, wishing he was _better_ in a million different ways. Wishing that he didn’t have such a talent at fucking things up.

“Okay,” he whispered into the kid’s hair, arms aching against how tightly he was gripping him. “Okay. I hear you.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. I always hear you.” He paused, rubbing a hand up and down his spine. “You should get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” Peter muttered, voice muffled, “so should you.”

“Mhm.”

He knew, of course, that neither of them would be able to bring themselves to sleep in the next few hours. This would be a restless night, full of tangled covers and wide-awake fear.

“Do you want to stay with me?” He whispered, and he wasn’t really sure what answer he was hoping for. On one hand, he never wanted to be separated from Peter but, on the other, a tiny part of him desperately wanted the solitude necessary for a breakdown.

“I’m not a kid anymore.”

“And that’s not an answer.”

There was a pause, as if Peter was weighing his adulthood against his fear.

“Yeah, okay,” he finally conceded, shifting even closer to Tony’s chest. “I’ll stay.”

“Alright,” he murmured back, and neither of them moved.

They let the moments stretch for a while. Tony had spent a good portion of his life endeavoring to fill every second with words. It wasn’t until Peter that he’d started to appreciate silence, to appreciate the peacefulness of just _existing_.

It was funny, then, that Peter was the one who disrupted the quiet.

“Tony?”

“Yes, Peter?”

“Promise me that everything’ll be okay.”

He was yanked back, suddenly, to the stumble-filled months when the Snap had been fresh. He’d felt like a newborn deer, then, desperately trying to cradle grief and insecurity and Peter all at once. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when both of them were feeling the absence at its sharpest, Peter would ask him for those kinds of promises. The kind of promises that were lies, covers for truths that hurt too much to face.

He’d been terrible at giving them, in the beginning, but he’d learned to lie now. In parenthood, he’d found that it was a requirement.

“Of course it’ll be okay, buddy. You have me.”


	5. For A Foolish Man To Learn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Whatever you’re doing,” Peter declared, hard decision forming on his face, “I’m coming with you.”
> 
> It hit him, suddenly, that he’d raised Peter to defy him like this. He’d raised him to push back, to cling to his morals, to plant his feet and stay steadfast when his ideals were threatened. He’d fostered this rebellion, encouraged it, coveted it. It was one of the things that made him love Peter so overwhelmingly. There had never been a fragment of the kid that was built for submission. He was alight with everything he did.
> 
> Peter would fight him on this until he gave in, and Tony didn’t have the luxury of waiting him out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the immortal words of nearly every movie version of Victor Frankenstein: It's Aliiiiiiiive!  
> Hi. I'm sorry. Here's 8.5k words of barely edited brain sludge to prove just how sorry I am.  
> My brain is broken and I have to be up early for workshop, but thank you to everyone who had stuck around with this story & with me. I say it a lot, but I really do love y'all.
> 
> Quick warning before we continue: this is an Endgame fix-it it in a sense, but Natasha does still die in this chapter. It happens entirely off-screen, but the aftershocks are felt. Sorry, y'all, but it was unavoidable. I could've killed Clint instead, but I was just too lazy to switch it up.
> 
> ***EDIT: I forgot to say this last night because I was literally falling asleep when I posted this, but the interactions between Tony & Howard in this chapter have been altered. I just... didn’t feel satisfied by it in the movie, so I changed it.

Peter looked ridiculous in the quantum suit.

To be honest, though, _everyone_ looked ridiculous in the quantum suit. Tony had handled the specifics of the nanotech, but let Scott do most of the designing, since they were modeling the systems after the Ant-Man suit. Style-wise, that had obviously been a mistake.

“You look like you stepped straight out of a Party City catalogue,” Tony teased, brushing his thumb along Peter’s jaw in the guise of checking the suit. He could see a tiny cut on the crest of his cheekbone. He must’ve nicked it when he’d shaved that morning. Tony had done his best to teach him, a few years ago, but the kid had never really gotten the hang of it. As precise as the kid was when he was out as Spider-Man, he could be butterfingered as hell in nearly every other situation.

Outside of Tony’s thoughts, Peter was rolling his eyes, grinning despite the sarcastic drawl in his voice. “Gee, _thanks_ Tony.”

He studiously ignored the jab. “You got the stealth suit on under that?”

The kid nodded, tapping his chest like that would somehow enable Tony to see underneath the quantum suit’s white breastplate. “Yep.”

“Good boy.”

He let out a breath, catching Peter’s eyes and holding them there for a second. Peter tilted his head, just minutely, waiting and waiting and waiting for Tony to be ready to step back, step away, step into the battlefield.

“You ready?” He asked, and he wasn’t really sure if he was asking Peter or himself.

“I’m ready.”

Tony really wished that he could sound that certain, too.

\--

Tony had done a lot of death marches in his life, but none of them had actually _felt_ like death marches.

Afghanistan had just felt like a normal weapons demo. Suiting up for New York had been terrifying, yes, but he hadn’t actually considered that he might _die_ that day. He hadn’t expected Steve to beat him half to death when he’d set out for Siberia. And the morning that Thanos had crashed into their lives at shatter-break velocity? God, he’d just gone jogging with Pepper. He’d barely even processed what was happening until it was over.

But this? The walk to the time travel platform, to the machine that would toss him and his team and Peter, his _child_ , into an all-out battle? _This_ felt like a death march.

Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe what they said was true, and you never really saw your death coming until it hit you.

They stood in a circle on the platform: like toddlers, like little kids congregated around a rug in their preschool classroom, waiting for a teacher to call on hands and lecture about tying shoelaces, or whatever the hell it was that kids learned in school nowadays. Except there was nothing youthful or innocent about what they were about to do, nothing as beautiful and brilliant as children taking their first stumbling steps in the world, learning to sound out their first words or tie their first bows.

Students to teachers. Soldiers to Captains. It was such a harsh distinction, when you were staring it in the face. One would bring learning, would bring light and bright and futures.

The other brought bloodshed.

Steve cleared his throat. It was strange, to Tony, how he didn’t look like he’d aged a day since they’d first met, all those years ago. Where Steve looked as young as ever, Tony had never felt the passing years _more_. Old age was creeping up on him in aching joints and graying hair. Peter liked to tease him about his wrinkles, eyes sparkling with a fondness that offset the offense, and there always seemed to be new ones to find when he looked in the mirror each night. And yet there stood Steve: patriotism and strength. His voice didn’t falter, didn’t hitch.

“Five years ago, we lost,” Steve started, fists clenching at his sides. This was what the mighty Avengers had been reduced to. Before, there had been glimmers of righteousness in their heroism. Now, it was all revenge. Bitter, nasty, teeth-edge revenge. “All of us. We lost friends, we lost family,” he inclined his head in Tony’s direction at that comment, and he felt a ridiculous swoop of grief at the reminder of _just how close_ Pepper had come to being his legal family. God, they’d been _so close_.

“We lost a part of ourselves,” Steve continued, oblivious to the _what-ifs_ knotting in Tony’s chest. “Today, we have a chance to take it all back. You know your teams, you know your missions. Get the stones, get them back. One round trip each. No mistakes. No do-overs. Most of us are going somewhere we know, but that doesn't mean we should know what to expect. Be careful. Look out for each other.” Steve took a breath, jaw locked, determined. “ _This_ is the fight of our lives, and we're gonna win.”

He sounded so certain, like there wasn’t any other option. Like the Avengers had never failed before.

Steve met his gaze, nodding almost imperceptibly, conveying an emotion that Tony couldn’t really describe in words. He just understood.

“Whatever it takes,” the solider promised.

Tony hated that phrase. It made his hackles raise in the same way that the line _please secure your own mask before assisting others_ made him snort with derision. They were the kinds of sentiments that made logical sense, but were ridiculous when applied to the real world. There was no reality in which Tony would save his own skin before Peter’s, and there was no string of decisions that could lead him to lay down Peter’s life on the pedestal of _anything_ , even the salvation of the universe.

 _Whatever it takes,_ he thought, _but not Peter. You can have me, if you’d like, but you can’t have him._

“Good luck,” Steve finished, and Tony couldn’t help but feel like they’d just listened to their own funeral sermons.

And, yeah, maybe he was feeling a little cynical. In his defense, his negativity wasn’t entirely misplaced. There wasn’t anyone with a sane mind who would classify this mission as _safe_.

 **“** He's pretty good at that,” Build-A-Bear raccoon said, and the absurdity of the comment in comparison with the depth of Steve’s speech nearly made Tony bark out a laugh. As it was, he could sense Peter biting back giggles at his side.

Tony rolled his eyes as Scott cheerfully agreed, waving to Bruce. “Alright. You heard the man. Stroke those keys, jolly green.”

Bruce shot him a thumbs up from the control panel. “Tractors engaged.”

He blocked out the sounds of Rocket and Clint bickering in favor of looking over to Peter. The kid was fidgeting, but Tony couldn’t tell if it was from nerves or excitement. Probably both, considering.

“Ready?” He asked, and sometimes it felt like that was all he _ever_ asked Peter _. Are you ready to go to the Decimation memorial, look at May’s name? Are you ready to go to college? Are you ready to go back out as Spider-Man? Are you ready to grow up, be an adult, leave me behind?_

_Are you ready for this? Please say that you aren’t, because I’m not. I don’t know if I ever will be._

“Duh,” Peter shot back, grinning. “I feel like I’m in a Star Trek episode.”

“A good one or a bad one?”

The kid shrugged. They were about to get shot back in time on a mission that could kill them all, and the kid _shrugged_.

God, Tony adored him.

“I don’t really care.”

Distantly, he heard Natasha breathe out a little, “see you in a minute,” to Steve, and then the platform tore away into color and sound.

\--

As it turned out, time travelling was easier the third time around. Tony didn’t know if that was a side effect of experience, or just because he had Peter to focus on through the discomfort of his body being reassembled.

The kid stumbled a little on the landing (did it count as a landing if you didn’t actually _land_ , so much as _arrived_?) and stared down at his hands like he couldn’t believe they were solid, but he grinned cheerfully at Tony when their eyes met, and the ball of worry in his chest softened at the sight.

Steve, of course, was all business all at once.

His quantum suit folded away to reveal one of the older versions of the Captain America suit, the one that Coulson had helped design. It made Tony feel strangely nostalgic, although he stamped the sensation down in favor of focusing on the literal _battle_ screaming and crashing down all around them.

“Alright, we all have our assignments. Two Stones uptown, one Stone down. Stay low. Keep an eye on the clock.”

Tony didn’t have a clue if Steve was going to continue his orders, because he was cut off by the Hulk, the _2012 version_ of the Hulk, crashing down just a couple dozen feet away and, well, _smashing_.

He had to admit, the violence was impressive. Even Peter, wide-eyed with both appreciation and trepidation, took a half-step towards Tony. He wouldn’t lie and say that the gesture didn’t make his chest go a little funny. Even after all this time, Peter knew what his first line of defense was.

They scurried away to their respective assignments after that, still wary but refusing to show it, because that’s just not what superheroes did. There were a handful of blocks standing between Tony’s group and the Tower: places where pieces of building had collapsed, crumbled cars had ignited, or fire hydrants had burst and flooded underpasses.

Until that moment, Tony had never really considered how terrifying the Battle of New York must’ve been for the citizens at ground zero. He was considering it now, though. Considering the loss of life, in more ways than one. The loss of literal life, the loss of livelihoods, the loss of peace of mind. He was living those tragedies in vivid, first-person technicolor.

He didn’t let his hand leave Peter’s elbow as they made their way through the streets, Scott tailing behind, cracking jokes at all the inappropriate moments. Tony could tell that his overprotectiveness was irking Peter, just slightly, because his jaw was tight, back tensed straight. Tony knew that the kid was trying to make himself seem taller, trying to look more _adult_ than _child_ , but it never worked. It never _would_ work.

One day, if Tony did his job right, Peter would have kids of his own, and then he’d understand. Until then, he’d just have to be pissed.

Peter hated it when he tried to protect him, at least in situations like this. He allowed emotional shelter, even sucked it up greedily, but the side of Tony that longed to bodily shove himself between Peter and danger seemed to be a hard limit for the kid. He supposed it was a byproduct of the monumental losses Peter had faced in his too-short life. He’d become accustomed to death, accustomed to grief and voids of spaces where people were meant to be.

He’d buried too many people. He didn’t want Tony to be another.

And yet Tony had done the same: he’d buried his parents, buried Jarvis, hadn’t even had a _chance_ to bury Pepper. He knew, he just _knew_ , that burying Peter would undo him. Without Peter, what did he have?

Nothing. He had _nothing_.

So, he clutched the kid’s arm, and ignored the way Peter’s face pinched in annoyance. Ignored the way that a little voice in the back of his mind reminded him that he was _selfish_. He was terribly, terribly selfish.

By the time they reached the Tower, the huge _STARK_ letters had already been destroyed, leaving only the infamous _A_ that would spit the world into a new age: an age of Avengers. Tony forced himself not to look at it, just let his nanotech form a replica of Mark VII. Peter quickly slid his helmet and goggles on, and Tony just hoped that no one looked too closely at his babyface. The kid may be 21, but he _did_ look young, even outside of Tony’s personal biases. And while Peter’s youthful appearance was funny when he occasionally got offered children’s menus at restaurants, it wouldn’t be quite so funny if it blew their cover.

Scott shrunk, which was still a remarkably strange event to watch, and perched on his shoulder. He held out a gauntlet to Peter, smiling under the faceplate.

“Hey, Spider-Kid,” he joked, “want a ride?”

Peter smiled, head tilting. And yeah, good, he’d already let the overprotectiveness go. That was a win. The kid had a habit of holding grudges for _weeks_.

Then again, maybe Peter knew that they might not have weeks. If this went south, they might not even have _hours_.

“It’s Spider- _Man_ ,” Peter snapped, not a hint of genuine heat behind the words. Hell, he was still smiling when he said it.

“Oh, hush.” He smirked. “You’ll _always_ be my Spider-Kid.”

“Ugh,” Peter groaned, face scrunched up in disgust. “Gross. You’re gross.”

“Nah, he’s just a dad,” Scott said, though the comms, because Tony imagined they wouldn’t actually be able to hear his voice when he was this small. “We’re dad-gross. It’s a special kind of gross. And you guys like it.”

“I do _not_.”

“Yeah, you do,” Tony teased, then sobered. As much as he’d like to spend an eternity putting this off, as much as he wished he could turn tail and run for the hills, he couldn’t. They had a job to do, and people were counting on them. “Alright, kid. Grab on.”

Peter did as he was told. If Tony was being honest, he was actually quite good at that: following direct orders, going where Tony put him. It’d gotten fuzzier, over the years, as familiarly and adulthood eroded at their previous dynamic, but the kid’s knee-jerk reaction to follow Iron Man’s lead had never _really_ faded.

He curled an arm around Peter’s waist, triple checking that it was firm, that the kid wouldn’t slip out. He could feel Peter sticking to the suit, but he still didn’t want to risk it.

“That hurt?” He asked, softly, hoping Scott wouldn’t pick up the tone but knowing that he probably would.

Peter sighed dramatically. “No, it’s fine.”

“You sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. Onward and upward, then.” He checked his grip on Peter one last time. “Everybody know their jobs?”

He got a chorus on agreement.

“Great.” The repulsers whined at he fired them up, loud and obnoxious. “Then let’s party.”

\--

The mission went about as well as most of their missions. Which, of course, meant that it went to absolute shit.

Peter hadn’t spoken a single word since they’d lost the Tesseract, but he _had_ been hugging close to Tony’s side, which told him that he wasn’t angry. Sad, yes, and probably scared, too. Confused. Those were usually the emotions that made the kid be so loosely affectionate in public.

If Tony was being honest, he desperately, _desperately_ wanted to rewind time. Take them back to last week, when their lives had been emptier but happy and safe. Before all of this had come crashing into them. Because now, he’d given Peter hope. He’d given him hope, given him a chance, and then he’d fucked it up. He’d fucked it all up.

Tony knew how much a hope deferred hurt. He knew the scars it left behind, the kind of gaping wounds that festered and bled. He’d already stitched Peter up once, and that had been ages ago, long before the thought of the kid become the most precious, beautiful, golden thing in his mind.

He didn’t know if he could survive the full weight of Peter’s grief all over again.

Steve’s rendezvous point was deserted. There were a few hollowed out cars scattered between the buildings, bricks and other rubble strewn across the ground, but there wasn’t an Avenger or a civilian in sight.

The battle was over. Now, what was left?

For New York, billions of dollars’ worth of damage to rebuild. For Tony, a hope-broken kid and a one-chance plan that had _failed_.

They only had to loiter around in tense silence for a minute or two before Steve dropped down from above, Loki’s scepter in tow. So _he_ hadn’t failed, then. Well, that was nice. And, of course, completely infuriating.

“Cap,” he called out, and Steve swung to face them. “Sorry. We, uh, we’ve got a problem.”

Off to the side, Scott snorted. “Yeah we do.”

He explained what had happened in as few words as possible, and did his best to ignore Steve’s face growing more and more frustrated as the story unfolded. By the end, he looked ready to throw his shield at the nearest building just for the hell of it.

Little known fact: America’s golden boy had one hell of a temper. Tony wasn’t much for selling stories to tabloids, but if he was, he imagined that his observations on the subject would make a fantastic headline.

“Well, what’re we gonna do now?” Steve asked, face creasing in irritation.

Tony’s head hurt. The entire mission was screwed. He could see Peter’s hands shaking. And now, he had Captain American himself glaring him down, like this was all his fault, like he hadn’t risked _everything_ for this. Like he hadn’t given every goddamn piece of himself, of his money, of his life, of his _family_ to Steve’s gang of superheroes. God, all he wanted to do was grab Peter and run. Take him as far away as he could. Hide him. Keep him away from superheroes and missions and _certainly_ away from Infinity Stones. And yet here they both were, against Tony’s instincts, his better judgement. Here they were.

“You know what?” He sighed, heavy and hard-edged. “Give me a break, Steve. I just got hit in the head with the Hulk.”

“You said that we had one shot,” Scott rambled, tone as sharp as Tony had ever heard it. “This… _This_ was our shot. We shot it. It's shot. Six stones or nothing. It was six stones or _nothing_.”

He’d never done well with people shouting at him, and this was no exception, even if it ought to be.

“You’re repeating yourself, did you know that?” He shot back, purposefully not glancing at Peter or Steve, because he knew he’d just find disappointment there. Different kinds of disappointment, certainly, but disappointment all the same. “You’re repeating yourself.”

“You're repeating yourself. _You're_ repeating yourself.”

God, Tony had already raised one teenager. He did _not_ need this bullshit again.

“Come on,” he snapped, and he just barely caught Peter straighten out of the corner of his eye. It took him a long second to realize it was because he’d employed his I’m-Dad-and-I’m-pissed voice. “We aren’t going to play it like this-”

“ _You_ never wanted a time heist,” Scott accused, and yeah, Tony _hadn’t_ wanted to do this. Hadn’t wanted to do _any_ of it, but he was still here. Had still abandoned one of the only havens he’d even known for this stupid, one-in-a-million chance. “You weren’t on board with the time heist. You _ruined_ the time heist.”

Guilt reared up past his pride, because as irritating as Scott’s accusations were, they also weren’t _wrong_. If it hadn’t been for Tony, the plan would’ve worked. “Listen,” he offered, splaying his hands out in acquiesce, “I dropped the ball.”

It looked like Scott was going to snap back at that, but then Peter stepped forward, kicking listlessly at a piece of rubble as he went. His voice was soft, so soft that it was hard to hear, but Tony had never missed anything his kid had said. Never.

“Can we, uh, can we just not fight about this?” Peter met Tony’s eyes, then Scott’s, then Steve’s. “I mean, it’s not… there’s just no point, y’know? We gotta just… move on. Figure out what we do next. I mean… there’s gotta be other options, right? Something else we can do?”

“No, no, no,” Scott yelled, stepping closer to Peter. Tony knew, logically, that he didn’t actually mean to intimidate anyone, that he was just desperate and frightened and grief-stricken, but the action made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, so he surged forward, ready to jump in if anything got too volatile. “There's no other options, there's no do-overs.” There was an abandoned car nearby, its front door hanging open, and Scott slammed it shut. The resulting _smack_ made everyone flinch. “We're not going anywhere else. We have one particle left. _Each_. That's it, alright? We use that? Well, bye-bye. You're not going home.”

Tony froze. Wait. Wait, wait, _wait_. His mind connected dots so quickly that he could barely keep up with it, and he certainly couldn’t detail the process, but it all snapped into place. All of it. The problem wasn’t whether or not there was another chance to get the Tesseract. _That_ they could find. The problem was the _particles_.

And Tony could fix that. He could fix it. Shit, _shit_. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?

“I got it,” he said, cutting off Steve mid-sentence. “There's another way. To retake the Tesseract _and_ acquire new particles.”

He stalked up to Steve, because he knew he’d understand. At least, he’d understand enough. Peter wouldn’t, he was just too young, and to a civilian like Scott, it’d sound like gibberish, but Steve would know. He _had_ to.

“Little stroll down memory lane,” he breathed, voice soft. “Military installation, Garden State.”

Steve’s face slid from confusion to understanding to curiosity, but he didn’t veto it, just furrowed his brow, thoughtful. “When were they both there?

“They were there at a time...” He sighed, side-glancing at Peter, whose gaze was fixed on him, like always. “I have a vaguely exact idea.”

“How vague?”

“Tony?” Peter stepped closer. His tone was quiet, seeking. “What are you talking about?”

It hurt like a bitch, but he ignored him. It was something he swore that he’d never do, not again, not after those first few months nearly shattered them apart, but he did it. He ignored him. Talked right over him, like he wasn’t the only goddamn thing alive that Tony would rend apart galaxies to protect.

“I know for a fact they were there,” he said, eyes still locked on Steve, “and I know how I know.”

“Tony, what _is_ it?”

There was a hint of demand in Peter’s voice now. Like he’d said, he _never_ ignored Peter. Ever. Peter spoke, Tony listened. The kid wasn’t used to being a backburner issue, and apparently, being one now was pissing him off.

But he just… he didn’t know how to explain this to Peter, and it probably wouldn’t even matter if he tried, because it was too big. It was one of the things he said he wouldn’t do. One of the risks he promised that he wouldn’t take.

He was going to take it, and he wasn’t going to let Peter follow along, and the kid was going to hate him for it. He was going to absolutely despise him. And there were only a few things that Tony hated more than Peter despising him but, unfortunately for the kid, putting him in danger was one of them.

There wasn’t a point to rejoining the world if Peter wasn’t there to live in it. Tony believed that with every inch of himself.

He could see the moment Steve decided to go along with the plan. “Well,” he said, “it looks like we're improvising.”

Peter physically grabbed him, now, pulling weakly on his arm: a little kid trying to get their parent’s attention. “Tony? What are we improvising?”

Steve pushed past them, and handed Scott the scepter. “Get this back to the Compound.”

“Wait, wait, hold on just a second,” Scott said, holding the scepter like it might burn him if he got too close. “What's in New Jersey?”

“ _Tony_ ,” Peter snapped, and this time, when he pulled on Tony’s arm, he yanked. “Tony, what’s going on?”

“Listen,” he murmured, finally catching Peter’s eyes, and half wishing that he hadn’t. It was so much harder to make these kinds of reckless decisions when the kid was around. And for so long now, that had been a _good thing_ , because Tony hadn’t been Iron Man in _five years_. He didn’t _have_ to make brash, dangerous choices. But now the world had crashed into them, and he had to do this. He _had_ to.

It was just so much harder to tempt tragedy when he had something so precious to live for.

“You have to trust me, alright?” He said, intense but hushed. “Can you do that?”

“Of course I trust you. You _know_ I trust you,” Peter whispered, eyes flickering over to Steve before re-centering on his face. “But you… you gotta talk to me, too. Tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m sorry, Pete,” he said, “but you’re gonna have to give me a little bit of that blind faith here.”

The kid’s nose wrinkled. “You’ve always told me that blind faith is dangerous.”

And… that was true. _Always examine the things people try to make you believe,_ he’d always say. _Even if those people are people that you love, alright? You always, always think for yourself._

“Please, Pete,” he repeated, and if there was ever someone he didn’t mind begging, it was his kid.

But, unfortunately, if there was ever someone _more_ stubborn that him, it was also his kid.

“Whatever you’re doing,” Peter declared, hard decision forming on his face, “I’m coming with you.”

It hit him, suddenly, that he’d raised Peter to defy him like this. He’d raised him to push back, to cling to his morals, to plant his feet and stay steadfast when his ideals were threatened. He’d fostered this rebellion, encouraged it, coveted it. It was one of the things that made him love Peter so overwhelmingly. There had never been a fragment of the kid that was built for submission. He was alight with everything he did.

Peter would fight him on this until he gave in, and Tony didn’t have the luxury of waiting him out.

“Alright,” he relented, and the guilt from losing the Tesseract was quickly replaced by the guilt of what he was about to do next. “Alright, kiddo. Gimme your hand.”

Steve’s presence loomed up beside him. “Tony, do you really want to do this?”

“Worry about yourself, Cap.” He poised his fingers over the GPS strapped to Peter’s wrist, hoping that the kid was too satisfied with his perceived win to notice the shame on his face. “Ready for the coordinates?”

For a brief second, Tony was sure that Steve was going to argue, but to his surprise and relief, he let it slide. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who recognized that they were running on borrowed time.

“Ready.”

“Alright. 0-4, 0-7, 1-9-7-0,” he relayed, typing an entirely different set of numbers into Peter’s device, and then quickly inputting the right sequence into his own. Steve nodded along as he went, muttering the sequence back to confirm.

“Are you sure?” Scott suddenly asked, and Tony glanced up at him. He looked incredulous, bordering on manic. “Cap. Captain. Steve, sorry. America. Rogers. Look, if you do this, and this doesn't work, you're not coming back.”

Peter tensed at the statement, and Tony briefly considering driving his fist into Scott’s face, before he pulled back, reined himself in. Scott was right. If this went wrong, he’d never see his Peter again.

He did a quick calculation in his head. Peter was born in 2001. If he got stuck where they were going, he’d be 74 by the time the kid was born.

_I have to come back._

“Thanks for the pep talk, pissant,” he drawled. Then he turned to Steve, turned away from Peter, turned away from his promises and the cowardice he wanted to choose. “You trust me?

“I do.”

“Your call.”

“Here we go.”

It wasn’t until after they initiated the jump that he realized he hadn’t remembered to tell Peter that he loved him.

\--

They landed at the base in a deserted workout yard behind one of the storage buildings. After a few adrenaline-fueled seconds spent checking that the coast was clear, they pressed themselves up against the wall, chests heaving.

Tony knew that he ought to be formulating a plan, but in reality, the first thought he’d had in 1970 was the same first thought he had every morning: _is Peter okay?_

Annoyingly enough, it also seemed to be the first thing that Steve was eager to mention.

“Where’s the kid?” The soldier asked, glancing around them, taking stock of exits and clearings and all the other things Tony knew he’d been trained to catalogue.

“The Compound,” he answered, and the admission made something sharp flit through his throat, “where he’s safe.”

Something like admiration fell over Steve’s face. “Son of a bitch. You tricked him.”

He swallowed hard. “To be fair,” he defended, wishing that they were talking about pretty much anything else but this, “you’ll find that it’s not a rare technique in parenting.”

Steve shrugged the defense away. “Easy, Tony. I wasn’t blaming you. I’m actually impressed.” He glanced off into the distance, eyes squinting into the sky, before looking back. “He’s not gonna be happy when we get back, is he?”

Ouch. _Way to hit on the thing I’m trying my best to ignore, Steve._

“No, he’s not.”

“Hey,” the soldier’s hand landed heavy on his shoulder, and for a split second, Tony could see the friendship they should’ve had, the one they were so close to so many times before circumstance and deception tore it apart, “it was the right thing to do, Tony. You got him safe, and now you can focus on the mission.”

He bit back his kneejerk response, which was to tell Steve to shove his mission where the sun don’t shine, because this mission _was_ important. It mattered beyond him and Peter, as much as he hated to admit it.

What he’d done was the right thing, maybe, but Tony knew better than anyone that the right thing and the thing he wanted were very rarely aligned.

“Yeah, yeah,” he forced out. “The mission. Awesome. Love the mission.”

“The mission,” Steve affirmed, and he was all Captain again, every hint of friendship evaporating with the words. “Alright, Tony. This was your idea. Where do we start?”

Yes. Start. They needed a start. Plans he could handle. They didn’t involve all the complex hurricanes of emotion that surrounded the thought of Peter. They were straightforward, solid. A plan was exactly what they both needed.

“Well, for one thing,” he dragged his eyes up and down Steve’s uniform, mouth quirking up at the corner because this back and forth was good, familiar, “you’re going to need to be a little less… _spangley_.”

\--

In retrospect, he should’ve known that he’d run into Howard.

Jesus, that’s how he’d known that the Tesseract would be there in the first place: because of his father. Tony had _known_ that.

And yet when the man rounded the corner, he’d never been more blindsided by anything in his life.

“Looking for Doctor Zola,” Howard said, and if Tony wasn’t still reeling in the shock of seeing his decades-dead father standing just a few paces in front of him, he might’ve laughed at the absurdity of the whole situation. “Have you seen him?”

He clutched the handle of the briefcase, the one he’d stuffed the Tesseract into, even tighter, and tried to force himself to be calm, suave. He was Tony _goddamn_ Stark, for Christ’s sake. He could talk his way out of anything.

But, then again, he’d never been able to talk himself out of shit with Howard. That had always been a part of the problem.

“Yeah, no,” he rushed out, sounding breathless and stupid in a way that he hadn’t since he was a teenager. “No Doctor Zole. No, I, uh, I haven't seen a soul.”

Oh, good. Good. He was _rhyming_ , now. That was just swell. Not suspicious at all. And, even better, he promptly smacked into a chair, sending it spinning, nearly tripped over his own feet as he rushed to steady it.

“Pardon me,” he winced out, even as his brain screeched a chorus of _shut up, shut up, shut up._

Howard was close enough to really inspect him, now, and his eyes narrowed just slightly. “Do I know you?”

_God, you have no idea._

“No, sir. I'm, uh,” he pulled off his sunglasses, held up his fake badge, “I’m a… a visitor from MIT.”

“Oh, MIT,” Howard mused, and then his voice leapt up, demanding in the way that Stark men had perfected. Now it was Tony who used that tone, it had been years since he’d heard it from Howard, and yet it still made him jump, stomach twisting like he was a rebellious kid all over again. “Got a name?”

In the jolt of it, of all of it, he said the only two names that he’d _always_ remember.

“Uh, Peter. Peter… Peter Potts.”

“Well, I'm Howard Stark,” his father said, extending his hand. Tony took it shakily, hoping that muscle memory would take over and stop him from screwing it up. Thankfully, it did, and he could see some of Howard’s suspicion evaporate. He had a businessman’s handshake, something he’d perfect from years and years of meetings and galas and constant introductions, and Howard clearly felt the confidence within the grip that the rest of his demeanor lacked.

“Hi,” he breathed, and he wondered, briefly, if this was karma for all the times he’d chuckled at Peter’s lack of social skills. The kid could do calculus in his head, but he couldn’t hold a professional conversation to save his life. Tony had spent a long time trying to teach him, but it’d never done much good. The kid was sweet, sure, but Tony wasn’t sure that he’d ever be a socialite.

And now here Tony was: fumbling over himself, acting just like his dumbass kid.

Howard was studying him like a conundrum. “You look a little green around the gills there, Potts.”

“I'm fine,” he forced out, hoping that his expression was more smile than grimace. “Just long hours.”

Howard seemed to accept the excuse, then he gestured behind him, towards the exit. “Well, you wanna get some air?”

For some reason, the question made reality catch in his chest, pushing away the haze of shock and rooting him to the present. God, this was his _father_. Younger than he remembered him being, sure, but still his father. How long had he spent building up a moment like this? And here it was, here _he_ was, right in front of him.

It didn’t pass his notice that Howard had never spoken this kindly to him when he’d known that Tony was his son. For the first time in his life, he was getting a glimpse at the Howard Stark that the rest of the world had known: charming, pleasant, famously outgoing. A part of him wanted to revel in it, but the other side of him, the one that still cowered belly-up at every mention of Howard’s name, resented the illusion so strongly that he could taste the bitterness on his tongue.

“Hello?” Howard said, and there was _amusement_ on his face. Genuine, engaged amusement. “Potts?”

“Yeah,” he breathed, dragging himself back to the present by sheer force of will. “That would be swell.”

Howard pointed again, grinning, and Tony wondered if he’d ever really seen that expression on his face before. Had his father ever smiled at him? No, god, definitely not. Scowled, without a doubt, but smiled? No, never.

Howard Stark had never been proud. He was either disappointed, or, when Tony did what was expected to, apathetic. And he certainly never smiled.

Tony made a beeline for the exit, eager to move, to create forward momentum, to do _something_ other than stand around and stutter and make a fool of himself in front of the one person he’d spent a lifetime trying to overshadow.

Then, Howard’s voice stopped him.

“Need your briefcase?”

Shit. Shit. Right. The Tesseract. God, he was an _idiot_. The damn Tesseract was the whole point of this circus and he’d nearly _forgotten it_.

He pulled the case nervously from Howard’s grasp, only managing to muster up a helpless chuckle. He’d meant to say _thank you_ , had meant to say _anything_ , but his brain was still firmly disconnected from his mouth.

They headed towards the exit together, and Tony kind of felt like he was hovering above his body, absent and yet intensely present all at once.

Howard, of course, was completely oblivious.

“You're not one of those beatniks, are ya, Potts?”

If he hadn’t been so damn paralyzed, Tony wouldn’t’ve been able to hold back his laughter.

\--

It was sometime in the elevator that Tony, finally, _finally_ felt like he planted his feet back on the ground. He was still shaky, hands subtly trembling in the aftershocks of his surprise, but he was in control. He was Tony Stark. It didn’t matter who was standing in front of him. He was _Tony Stark_. He could handle it. He always did.

“So,” he said, taking in the can and bundle of flowers that Howard was holding, “flowers and, uh, and sauerkraut. You got a big date tonight?”

“Well, my wife's expecting,” Howard said, holding up the bouquet, and Tony teetered precariously on the edge of _absolutely losing his shit_ all over again, because it was 1970 and _of course_. Of course. Of-freaking- _course_. “And, uh... too much time at the office.”

He swallowed back the crisis, staring a little helplessly at the wall in front of them. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Howard said, tone holding about as much enthusiasm as Tony had felt going into this mission. He held out flowers and sauerkraut, clearly uninterested in maintaining the conversation. Most expecting parents would’ve been crowing, and yet here was Howard: distant, reserved. “Hold this, will you?”

“Yeah, sure.” He spun the can around in his hands, trying to run numbers and dates through his head. “How far along is she?”

“Uh, I don't know,” Howard measured his hand out in front of his stomach, and Tony couldn’t help the sharp sting of rejection. He hadn’t even been _born_ yet, and his father was already uninterested in his existence. “She's at the point where she can't stand the sound of my chewing. I guess I'll be eating dinner in the pantry again.”

Even in the face of Howard’s apathy, the thought of his mother made him smile. A tiny, selfish part of him wished that he’d had the chance to see _her_ again. God, why did it have to be Howard? There was so much he’d tell her. There was so much he wished she could’ve seen.

He wished he could’ve introduced her to Peter. Howard would’ve hated him, he knew that, would’ve thought he was straggly and geeky and shamefully awkward, but Maria would’ve adored him. She would’ve loved him so desperately.

“I have a son,” he blurted before he could stop himself.

Howard’s expression twisted and, after all, what kind of reaction had Tony been expecting? Even if he’d known that Tony was talking about his grandchild, he couldn’t imagine Howard jumping for joy. And god _forbid_ he told the man that Peter was adopted. He’d never forget the night that his mother had suggested bringing in a foster child once Tony went to college. Howard had exploded, the words _Anthony’s bad enough, and now you want to throw somebody else’s child into the mix?_ cutting sharp through the walls.

“I’d prefer a girl,” Howard said. “Less of a chance she'd turn out exactly like me.”

For a second, Tony found himself stunned. As far as he knew, Howard _only ever_ wanted Tony to turn out exactly like him.

He blinked, head tilting, genuinely curious. “What'd be so awful about that?”

Howard snorted. “Let's just say that the greater good has rarely outweighed my own self-interest.”

The elevator opened just as Howard finished, and he slapped Tony’s arm, headed straight outside. Tony trailed along behind him, a memory of Peter’s voice filling his head.

_You’re not your father, Tony. He sounded like a total douchebag, and you’re definitely not._

_How’d you figure that, kid?_

_Cause you’re my favorite person in the world. And, like, total offense to your dad, but he doesn’t sound like he was anybody’s favorite person._

As hard as it was to remember sometimes, he _hadn’t_ turned out like his father. He knew that. Howard would’ve never fallen in love with someone like Pepper. He would’ve never done the things that Iron Man had. There had been signs of their divergence peppering throughout Tony’s entire life, but he’d missed them, completely disregarded the obvious.

At least, he’d missed them until he’d had Peter.

Howard would’ve never taken Peter in. He would’ve never held him when he cried, driven two hours just to find a store that stocked his favorite Christmas cookies, moved into the countryside just to light a spark in the kid’s eyes. Howard never would’ve loved _anything_ as all-consumingly as Tony knew he loved Peter.

The thought ached somewhere deep in his gut. God, _Peter_. He’d spent so long envisioning a chance to see his father again, and now that it was here, all he wanted was to go home.

He squinted as they headed into the bright sunlight of the basecamp’s courtyard. Howard was a few steps ahead, and Tony jogged to catch up. He was still holding the flowers, after all.

“So,” he said, clearing his throat and hoping that his voice didn’t betray the chaos running through his head, “where are you at with names?”

“Well, if it's a boy, my wife likes Almanzo.”

He had to bite back a snort. _Well, that A is close,_ he thought _, although you’re the only person who will ever really use it._

“Huh,” he pretended to muse. “Might wanna let that stew a little. You’ve got time.”

Howard grunted in response, and then he stopped, turned to face Tony in the middle of the confusion of soldiers and tanks and voices.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said, and he almost looked _uneasy_ , but that couldn’t be right, because Tony was pretty sure that the only way _uneasy_ and _Howard Stark_ ever existed together was when he inflicted the sensation on somebody else. He certainly didn’t _feel_ it.

“When your kid was born… were you nervous?”

At one point had Peter been _born_ to him? Certainly not in August of 2001, when the kid had taken his very first breath. In fact, considering Tony’s general activities in that year, he spent a great deal of time purposefully _avoiding_ thoughts of what he might’ve been doing at that moment. He thought back to when he’d realized that he had to live for the kid, and yet even that didn’t feel like a beginning. He hadn’t taken the responsibility with joy or reverence or any of the emotions that belonged to new parenthood. At the time, the world had just been one awful, ugly reminder of Pepper’s absence, and the epiphany of Peter’s need for him had felt like being slapped in the face.

He’d signed Peter’s adoption papers while drunk off his ass. No matter how wonderful the result might’ve been in the end, he still looked back on that moment with shame.

And yet… he _did_ know the moment that Peter had, in all truth and emotional compass, become his child. It had been a little over six months after the Snap, swaddled in the middle of a dull afternoon, and Peter had made him laugh.

As cheesy as it sounded, the moment had stood out as a spark. It was the first true flicker of light in his life since that spaceship, since finding out that Pepper was gone. He’d spent so long in the darkness, and then there was sunrise. And then there was Peter.

The love he’d felt in that second had been so sudden, so tangible, that he realized it had been festering somewhere, growing and infecting and taking shape, long before he’d been cognizant enough to recognize it.

And then had come the terror, the guilt, and horror that accompanied seeing yet another thing for him to lose.

He looked Howard in the eyes and answered with more confidence and solidity than he’d ever felt in the man’s presence. “Wildly. Yeah.”

There was a flash of relief over Howard’s face, and Tony really didn’t know how he was meant to process that.

“Did you feel qualified?” He asked, tentative. “Like you had any idea how to successfully operate that thing?”

He wanted to tell Howard that _that_ was his problem. There was no such thing as success when it came to parenting. Not really. Success was something you were meant to measure, something that had milestones and pride and accomplishments attached. Parenting was a _train wreck_. It was screwing it up and trying again and hoping that, at the end of it all, you’d managed to produce a human being that was, at the very least, capable of being happy.

And you sure as hell didn’t _operate_ a child. If anything, Tony was pretty sure that _Peter_ operated _him_.

But he _didn’t_ say that. He didn’t say any of it. Maybe that was something else that being a parent had taught him: some people just weren’t cut out for the job. Howard… hadn’t been. He’d been one hell of an inventor, one hell of a businessman, but he’d never had a chance in hell at being a good father.

Tony knew, logically, that it wasn’t his fault. But that didn’t mean he had to love him, and it sure as hell didn’t mean he had to forgive him.

“I literally pieced it together as I went along,” he said slowly, thinking of all the stumbles, all the moments he’d thought about quitting, throwing in the towel, until Peter would smile at him and all at once he’d decide that he’d do _anything_ , cross deserts and tundras and entire universes, if it meant that he could make the kid do that just _one more time_. “I thought about what my parents did right…”

“My old man, he never met a problem he couldn't solve with a belt.”

He winced internally. _Yeah, well, neither could you._

He caught a glimpse of Steve over Howard’s shoulder, saw him flash a thumbs up, and the burst of relief made his head spin.

They’d done it. Steve had found the particles. They’d… They’d actually done it. A few more minutes, and he’d be home. He’d have his kid.

He looked back to Howard and felt… just a little bit less resentful. A little bit more at peace. He knew that this man had scarred him, _would_ scar him, in a dozen different ways, but that was, at least in _his_ timeline, all in the past. It was done, over, and in the end, it’d turned out alright. _He’d_ turned out alright.

In some ways, he’d been a good parent to Peter _because_ of Howard. Because he’d known the worst, known exactly what he _didn’t_ want to be, and he’d steered clear of it. He’d found the right path by turning his back to the wrong one.

“I thought my dad was tough on me,” he said, “and well, maybe he was. But we keep going. And, anyway, my kid’s one hell of an educator, I’ll tell you that. You’ll learn. They don’t give you much choice.”

Howard considered him for a second, and there was a strange softness in his eyes. Tony let himself imagine, if only for the dream, that what he’d said might stick. That somehow, someway, this one conversation would change everything. That this Howard would love this version of Tony Stark, that they’d be the family he’d always craved.

He knew it wouldn’t happen, but it was a night thought.

“Good to meet you, Potts,” Howard finally said, taking the flowers and can from Tony’s hands and turning towards his awaiting car.

“Yeah…”

For a few heartbeats, he just watched him leave. Then, he cleared his throat, stepped after him.

“Hey, Howard?” Their eyes met. “Good luck with… with all of it.”

“Thanks, Potts.”

\--

When he and Steve landed back on the platform in the Compound, the first thing Tony anticipated was Peter shouting at him.

He turned to the kid as soon as the dulled wave of dizziness left him, ready to face the music. After all, he deserved it. He’d lied to him, tricked him, broken all of their rules. Peter had a right to be angry, to feel betrayed.

Except Peter wasn’t even looking at him. His eyes were resting on the other side of the platform, face falling, expression twisting into something sad and horrified and scared.

When he followed his gaze, he understood why.

Clint was on his knees, Soul Stone clutched in his fist, the kind of torment on his face that made Tony’s entire body seize with memory. It was the apex of devastation, of loss. It was the haunted look that had revised everyone’s faces after Thanos, all those years ago. You walked the streets, and you couldn’t escape it.

And next to him, Natasha’s spot was empty.

He could see Bruce talk a half step forward in his peripheral vision. “Clint, where’s Nat?”

Clint didn’t say anything, but the realization spilled over the room anyway. Tony felt it crack something in his chest, and he hadn’t thought he could be rocked by grief anymore, thought he’d lost so much that it would sit numb, void, but _this_ hurt. It laid another layer in his chest, another death to be excavated after his own. If they broke him open in his grave, they could peel them up, carbon date the splintering.

Somewhere in the grip of the ache, he felt Peter’s chin settle on his shoulder, heavy, digging uncomfortably into the muscle there, but blessedly grounding. He wanted to reach around and touch him, pull him into his arms and keep him there until the world forgot that either one of them existed, by he was frozen by the crush of devastation that had constricted the room. Was frozen by the look on Clint’s face: the kind that told everyone that he would never, ever live again after this. Not really. Not like he had before.

Tony understood, but there was nothing he could say. There was nothing _anyone_ could say.

There was only the permanence of it. The empty space where words and triumph and _she_ should’ve been.

Tony knew that they’d won in the technicalities, that they had all the Stones, that they were fingertips away from realigning the two halves, but he couldn’t imagine putting this is in a trophy case. He couldn’t imagine putting this _anywhere_.

“I’m sorry,” Peter whispered, so quiet that he that doubted anybody else even realized the kid had spoken. “Tony, I’m… I’m so sorry.”

 _Me too_ , he thought, a half-sob shuddering through him. _Me too. Me too. Me too._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure there are typos but honestly.............. homegirl is ready to SLEEP


End file.
